


So Goes the Song

by aeli_kindara



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Porn, Background Hunting, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, Episode: s15e07 Last Call, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, POV Lee Webb, Pool & Billiards, Pre-Series, Sex Worker Dean Winchester, Stanford Era (Supernatural), The Impala (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-02-25 04:55:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21850270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: The first time Lee meets Dean Winchester, it’s courtesy of a chokehold.
Relationships: Lee Webb/Dean Winchester
Comments: 188
Kudos: 301





	1. Your Tricks and Your Needs

**Author's Note:**

> This is a WIP aiming to hit around 20k, currently about half written. Don't expect a happy ending, for obvious reasons, but there should be some fun along the way. Might update some tags as I go but the basics are there.
> 
> Title is a reference to [Worse or Better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxH9DUUFEd0) by The Devil Makes Three.
> 
> Thanks to [foolondahill17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolondahill17/pseuds/foolondahill17) for the incredible banner! ([Go leave kudos!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23173768))

The first time Lee meets Dean Winchester, it’s courtesy of a chokehold.

Lee’s just minding his own business. Running surveillance on the monster of the week’s hideout, rifle on its tripod and scope to his eye, when suddenly there’s an arm across his throat and a weight on his back and a gun cocking cold to his temple.

“Move and you’re dead,” hisses his assailant, and Lee weighs his options for all of a split second — yep, easy call — before throwing his hips and hooking the guy’s leg and rolling the two of them neatly across the floor. The gun goes off, but the shot flies wild, and then Lee’s got it dropping senseless from his attacker’s grip.

There’s a brief, furious scuffle as Lee’s would-be murderer tries to get free — and he’s good, but Lee’s got twenty pounds on him easy, and probably a few more years messing around with jiu jitsu. The kid — Jesus, he is _just_ a kid, high cheekbones and furious bright eyes and a full mouth that makes Lee double-take — no, not a girl — he’s a scrappy little fucker, though. Takes advantage of Lee’s distraction to fucking _bite_ the meat of his palm.

“Jesus fuck!” Lee swears, and then swears again, because — he thought he was dealing with a regular shifter, but what if it’s a werewolf? He does _not_ need that shit. Muscling past the kid’s defenses, he gets a hand on his mouth again and pries it open — just regular human incisors. Jesus. Okay. _Jesus._

The kid takes advantage of his momentary distraction to stab him in the side.

It isn’t deep. Glances off a rib; barely a scratch. But as Lee bellows and flails to disarm the kid, _again,_ he recognizes the tell-tale tarnish. The glint underneath.

Silver. That’s a _silver_ knife.

“You’re a hunter?” he gasps, still wrestling for control of the blade, when a deep voice from behind him says, “Get off of my boy. Hands in the air. Back away slowly, now.”

Lee turns his head.

The man in the doorway has a gun in his hand, rock-steady, aim directly between Lee’s eyes. He’s got dark hair and a three-day stubble and a look on his face like he’s killed men before and won’t mind doing it again. Incongruously, from behind his leather jacket, another face bobs — younger still than the kid on the floor, with a mop of dark hair and the coltish look of a teenager who’s just started his growth spurt and has plenty more to go.

Lee lets go of the knife. He doesn’t get stabbed again immediately, which he takes as a good sign. Instead, he releases the kid gingerly, rocking his own weight back onto the balls of his feet and standing, hands raised and empty.

The gun tracks him. The man in the door’s gaze doesn’t waver, but when he says, “Dean?”, it must be to the kid on the ground, because Lee sees him straighten as he sits up.

“Sir. No response to silver. I think he’s a hunter.”

“I’ll judge that for myself. Sammy, cover.”

Lee sees the younger kid swallow. But the pistol he raises is steady in his grip.

The older guy keeps half an eye on Lee as he stalks closer. “My name’s John Winchester. My sons are Sam and Dean. We’re hunters. If you are too, we’ll ask you to prove it with silver and holy water. Try anything, and you’ll bleed — whatever you are. Dean, the knife.”

Lee’s first assailant — Dean, apparently — holds it up without a word.

John takes it. “Good faith,” he says, and rolls up his sleeve, exposing pale skin. The blade presses against it, then slices down — a dark trickle of blood. John doesn’t flinch. He just flips the knife so he’s holding it by the blade, and offers the hilt to Lee.

Lee takes it in silence. Repeats John’s ritual. Then once more, with a flask of holy water. It tastes musty, and Lee resists the urge to make a face.

“Lee Webb,” he introduces himself as he lowers it. He doesn’t extend a hand.

“All right.” If John’s posture relaxes, it’s not obvious. “What intel have you got on this bastard?”

“Hang on,” Lee objects. “What about your sons?”

John glances over his shoulder. The gun’s still steady in Sam’s hands. “I vouch for my boys.”

“Yeah, well.” Lee pulls a face. “My intel is that we’re probably dealing with some kind of shifter, so if your boys don’t mind —”

“Jesus Christ,” mutters Dean. He’s pulling himself up from the floor, finally. “Dad, give it here.”

As Lee watches, Dean repeats the ritual. Then retrieves his own gun before he crosses the room to where Sammy’s standing, pistol unwavering, though his shoulders look like they’re starting to feel the strain.

Lee can barely hear Dean murmuring to him. “You’re okay. Stand down, soldier.” He unscrews the cap of the flask. “Here.”

Sammy’s arms are shaking as he finally lowers the weapon. It’s big for him, and he hasn’t learned the tricks yet, Lee thinks; how to brace his elbow like it’s second nature, how to shift his stance. He de-cocks the pistol carefully and holsters it, a little clumsy. Then he takes the offered drink.

He grimaces a little on it, like he doesn’t like the flavor any more than Lee did. When he reaches for the knife, though, Dean shakes his head and catches his hand, splaying it so Lee can see the palm. He presses the flat of the blade to Sammy’s skin. “See? He’s good.”

There’s a challenge in his tone, but Lee feels oddly like it’s pointed more at John than himself.

After a moment, John nods slowly. “All right.” Then, to Lee: “You good to fight, Webb?”

Lee grins broadly in answer.

John nods, once, decisive. “You and I will take point. Dean, Sam — guard the exits. It might know we’re coming; we’ve made enough noise.”

In the dim light, Dean’s face turns white, then red. “You said I’d be point for this —”

“That was before you got your ass beat with the element of surprise.”

“Dad —”

“Dean.” John’s tone is forbidding. “Take your brother and go do your job.”

Dean swallows. He shoots one furious glance at Lee. “Yes, sir.”

“Now.” John glances down at Lee’s sniper rifle, clearly unimpressed. “You spend all your time lurking on ledges, or you got anything that’ll be useful in a real fight?”

\---

They drink late that night, loud and laughing, celebrating their success. “This bastard,” John says once, face ruddy with whiskey, reaching across the table to clap Lee on the shoulder, “knows his way around a _fight.”_ And, later: “Come on — you must’ve served. Jarhead, right?”

Lee smiles wide and takes a drink before he answers. Then he pulls his dog tags out of his shirt and lies as easily as he always does. “SEAL Team 3.”

“A Squid!” And John’s turning to hail the bartender, waving for another round. Jammed in the corner by the wall, Sammy ignores them, surrounded by a fortress of textbooks. Beside him, Dean’s nursing a beer, but Lee sees his face tighten as John counts out bills, shoving them across the bar.

Later still, John slings an arm across Lee’s shoulders. Grips the muscle where his shoulder meets his neck and squeezes, bracing. “Headed out tomorrow on a case two states from here. Could use a partner.”

Lee laughs. “Nah, man. I got a thing with a girl in town; time for a little shore leave.” John nods sagely, and Lee adds, “‘Sides, you got —” He nods toward Dean, who’s got another beer tipped to his mouth, staring straight ahead like he can’t see them. “Nearly took _me_ out. Looks like pretty good backup from here.”

If he means it to soften the fury that’s hiding at the corners of Dean’s mouth, it doesn’t do its job. John just glances over his shoulder and answers, carelessly, “Dean needs to look after Sammy. He’s staying here.”

At the sound of his name, the younger kid’s face emerges for the first time in an hour from his textbook wall. “I’m _fifteen,_ ” he says. “And it’s Sam.”

Dean’s bottle clunks loudly as he sets it down on the bar. “You got school tomorrow, kiddo.” He’s not meeting anyone’s eye.

Sam sighs loudly, but he doesn’t protest — just starts to gather his things. He’s skinny, long arms and awkward elbows, but his cheeks look like they remember chubbiness. Lee was fifteen himself once, he guesses — not even that long ago. Ten years. It’s hard to believe he was ever that young.

Sam leads the way out of the bar. Dean follows, back rigid, eyes on the door.

\---

Lee doesn’t really expect to run into the Winchester kids again. He doesn’t expect _not_ to — they’re staying in town, and he wasn’t lying about the action he’s been hoping to catch. He winds up hanging around for another week that stretches into two.

It’s a small town, the kind with one grocery store and almost as many churches as there are bars. Bible Belt, truck stop, bright-lit all night plazas by the highway and the seedier joints just behind.

What can he say? Lee’s always been a sucker for a roadhouse.

Inside the air is blue with smoke, hanging in a haze over the pool tables, and not just tobacco either. Lee accepts what some girl offers him and a couple rounds later he’s floating in a pleasant haze, warm and magnanimous. He’s at the bar ordering a round of shots when he sees him, lounging against a wall near the back door.

Dean.

He’s dressed in ripped jeans and a tight t-shirt and he looks good enough to fucking _eat._ Hair spiked up and cheeks flushed and eyes bright — from the heat in here, maybe, though Lee’s also seen someone passing out little white pills, who can say — and his mouth. His fucking _mouth._ If Lee thought his lips were full before, right now they’re fucking obscene, shining under the swaying lights.

As if he can feel Lee’s stare, Dean raises a hand to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. Settles his shoulders against the wall, casts an assessing eye over the bar.

The realization upends itself over Lee, a bucket of cold water. Dean looks good enough to eat because he _wants_ to look good enough to eat. Place like this —

Lee leans across the bar again to shout over the noise. “One more,” he tells the bartender, who nods without looking up and adds an eighth shot glass to the line. When he hands them back, Lee manages to bundle them all against his chest. He moves through the pool tables dispensing whiskey and grinning through the cheers, then wades past them to come up beside Dean in his corner, two shots still in hand.

“Hey,” he says, quietly, and Dean jumps.

He spins and sees it’s Lee and his face performs a complicated series of revolutions. Shock, then dread, then a dismissive scoff; finally, he meets Lee’s eyes.

“If you tell my dad,” he says quietly, “I’ll fucking kill you.”

“Well.” Lee considers. “I don’t want to be a dead man.”

Dean’s eyes flash like he’s not sure if he’s being mocked. Lee raises a placating hand. “Relax, kid. Just thought I’d see if you wanted a drink.”

He offers the shot. It’s nothing fancy, well whiskey, and suddenly, for no good reason, he wishes he’d ordered something half decent for a change.

Dean shrugs and takes it. “Cheers,” he says, and knocks it back like water.

When he looks back at Lee, though, he’s breathing a little heavy, something complicated going on behind his eyes. “So,” he says, after a pause. “We doing this, or what? ‘Cause you might want to finish that first.” He nods to Lee’s own glass.

It takes Lee a second to catch up. He doesn’t say anything right away when he does; the pleasant floating feeling is still there, but there’s nothing to sober you up quite like watching a teenager whore himself out in the kind of joint where the walls probably have STDs.

“How old are you?” he asks, finally.

Dean scowls. “Twenty-one.”

Lie. Nineteen, maybe. Twenty at most. Damn Winchesters keep making Lee feel old.

“Shouldn’t let strangers buy you drinks.” He nods at the empty glass. “Coulda been anything in there.”

Dean doesn’t answer that, just gives him an insolent glare as if to say, _Yeah?_

Lee sighs. He runs a hand through his hair. He’s horny, and his skin is buzzing pleasantly, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’s exchanged money for services, but — he doesn’t want this. Not like this.

“C’mere,” he says instead, gesturing toward the pool tables. “More than one way to make a buck in a place like this.”

For a moment he thinks Dean’s going to hit him.

Then Dean smiles, too-bright. “Sure,” he says easily, and moves to the wall to take a cue.

\---

The kid plays a decent game of pool — Lee will give him that much.

It’s actually kind of fun to watch. Dean’s clearly played before, more than a few times, but he takes direction well — lets Lee murmur in his ear about what a mark might be thinking, how to lure them in, how to let them believe you’re good but not _that_ good, or you’re falling-down drunk, or you’re too confident for your own good. He bends over the table like he knows Lee’s watching, like he knows half the _bar_ is watching, but — hell. Lee’s only human. He can’t say he objects to that.

And there’s a pride in the set of Dean’s shoulders when he sinks the money shot — when he turns back to Lee, instinctive, looking for his approval, and Lee beams and hollers, “ _Yeah,_ kid” — yeah, he’s got another joint between his lips, he’s rolling — and claps Dean once, twice on the back.

“Again?” asks Dean, face alight. His eagerness makes Lee’s chest spike with something proprietary and fond. “Wanna make things interesting?”

And he’s counting out twenties — the one he just won off Lee, and four more. He looks up with a grin. “Even hundred. You in?”

There are voices from the crowd urging Lee on. He checks the clip of money in his pocket — he’s good for it. “All right, all right, settle down,” he calls out, feeling indulgent, and lays out his own money on the rail.

He can feel Dean’s eyes on the bills, sharp, like he’s waiting for the moment Lee’s fingers aren’t touching them anymore. _Aw, shit;_ Lee hasn’t thought this through. Maybe he should let the kid win again. He’d be down $120 — he can afford that, right? It’s not great, but it’s not the worst night he’s ever come home from.

Besides, Dean has a little brother to think of.

Dean racks the balls, gestures to offer Lee the break. “Nah, man,” says Lee, leaning back against the neighboring table and letting himself admire the clean lines of Dean’s hips, the sweat gleaming in the hollows of his neck. “You’re up.”

With an eloquent shrug, Dean turns and walks to the end of the table.

He leans over. Ass in the air like he knows what it looks like. Licks his lips once and drops the smile. Doesn’t glance toward Lee.

Sinks three balls in one smooth break.

That’s when Lee knows he’s maybe fucked.

Dean’s eyes don’t leave the table. “Solids,” he says, circling it, voice suddenly flat. Passes two easy shots to line up a tricky one — side pocket, got a bit of an angle to it. But it’ll leave his cue ball just right for the seven —

He hits it perfectly.

There’s a quiet settling over the roadhouse. Country music still playing tinny on the speakers, but the crowd’s suddenly hushed. They’re all watching — men, women — like they’re holding their breath.

Lee feels eyes on him, and he knows what they’re thinking. _You’ve been hustled, hustler. Whatcha gonna do?_

Dean runs the table.

“Corner pocket,” he says, finally, stretching to line up the shot across the table. It’s showboating — unnecessary. Dean’s shirt rides up as he reaches, exposing a line of skin above his jeans.

The eight ball rolls home. Lee hasn’t picked up his cue once. Dean doesn’t look at him, either, just collects the cash from the rail and finally turns to cast a critical eye over his audience.

Whatever he’s looking for, he finds it. A tilt of the chin, a smirk, eyebrows raised — and Dean’s turning and sauntering out, leaving his cue where he found it, without a backward glance.

He doesn’t need one. His next customer follows eagerly, head ducked down, offering a weak smile in the face of the gauntlet of eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from [Curtains Rise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTmfDTOvf5E) by The Devil Makes Three.
> 
> I've based Lee's age on the real-life age difference between the actors — about 6 years.


	2. A Hand Back Down

It’s years — actual years, three or more of ‘em, enough for a handful of broken teeth and a hell of a lot of water under the bridge — before Lee sees Dean Winchester again.

Those three haven’t been much different from the three before. Nothing about Lee’s life really changes, because everything changes: a new night, a new town, a new nasty to put in its place. Drive and fight and drink and fuck and do it all over again.

He’s in Virginia, he thinks. This time.

He doesn’t run into other hunters too often. Knows they’re out there, at least in theory, and knows about a couple joints they congregate — but John Winchester aside, he’s not much of one for teaming up. He’s been proving that since he was seventeen years old.

So he’s not too sure how, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world or whatever, Dean Winchester’s sitting in this one, interviewing _Lee’s_ witness.

Interviewing? Flirting, more like. He’s leaning at the bar in that big leather jacket Lee remembers on John from last time. Eyes intent on the girl’s face when she talks. Looking down, half-smiling, when he answers. He’s scribbling notes, slanting capitals on a pocket-sized notepad.

Lee slides into a seat down the bar, half-hidden behind a column, to wait.

They talk for a few more minutes. Dean caps his pen when he’s done. He touches the girl’s shoulder and says something with an earnest smile, and she scoots a little closer and dips her head low to whisper something else. Dean’s grin broadens; he takes the cap off his pen again and sticks it in his mouth, adds one more hasty note to the bottom of the paper.

Lee stares at the way Dean’s lips stretch around the pen cap. He can only see the back of the girl’s head, but she’s got to be doing the same.

Then Dean finishes writing — her number, presumably — and tucks everything back in his pocket. The girl smiles and pulls him in for a —

Hug. Weird, but okay.

When she leaves, Dean watches her go. There’s a smile on his face, one that briefly distracts the hell out of Lee before he remembers that the Winchester kid is here on _his_ turf, _his_ case, interviewing _his_ fucking witness.

“Son of a bitch,” he mutters under his breath, forcing his head back in the game, and pushes back his stool.

When Lee rounds the column, Dean sees him. His face goes very still for a moment; then his eyebrows raise. “Lee Webb.”

“Dean friggin’ Winchester,” Lee returns. “You got a real hard-on for messing with my cases.”

Dean cocks his head like he’s considering this. He stretches, lazy, shifting against the bar. Then he smirks. “ _Your_ case. I’m guessing you still think it’s a vengeful spirit, too.”

“It is a vengeful spirit.” Pretty open-and-shut — girl starts seeing the ghost of her friend who died in a drunk driving accident; turns up dead.

“If you wanna go digging up graves for nothing, well —” Dean’s smile widens — “be my guest.”

“ _Or,_ ” says Lee, taking a step closer, “you could stop playing and tell me what you got from _my_ witness, boy.”

The smile vanishes. “Go fuck yourself, Webb,” says Dean, and pushes himself off the bar without another word.

He lets the door bang behind him. Lee leans back against the bar with a long sigh.

A double whiskey appears at his elbow. “You look like you need that, hon,” says the bartender.

Lee turns to take it. “Thanks.”

\---

The thing is — Lee’s not actually a dumbass. He works out pretty quick they’re dealing with witches.

It’s still pretty rude of them to use _his_ saliva off the whiskey glass for their goddamn seeing-ghosts hex.

He ignores the apparitions, or tries to — but they keep dancing around him. Pleading: the other kids who got captured by that _thing._ That chick who worked at the psych ward — he feels bad about that; he does. His little brother, and when Lee sees that one he pulls up short. “You ain’t fucking dead.”

“Damn, _boy,_ ” drawls a voice behind him. Dean. “They got you good.”

Lee turns. He’s sweating. His brother’s tugging phantom fingers at his sleeve, pleading; he ignores it. “‘Less you know where these bastards are at,” he growls, “fuck off.”

Dean moves closer. He’s smiling, something wicked in it that freezes Lee where he stands.

Then there’s a cold handcuff clicking around Lee’s wrist, the other end fastening onto the handle of his car door. Dean steps back. “Try not to hurt yourself while I’m dealing with the coven, ‘kay?”

\---

When Lee gets there, Dean’s trussed up in the middle of a pentagram, bare-chested, symbols painted all over him in blood.

Lee tries not to smirk. He kills some witches. Then he lets Dean free.

His car’s fucked — ghost jumped out at him; ran it into a tree. So Dean gives him a ride back into town in the beater he probably hotwired, stops to collect Lee’s gear on the way.

Lee grunts as he shoulders his duffel. He hopes he has a clean goddamn shirt in there; his own is all stiff and bloody from the slash that last witch left in his side.

He drops the bag in Dean’s trunk. They drive. “Need a payphone,” he tells Dean, a few minutes later, without meeting his eyes.

Dean pauses. Then turns the wheel.

It’s on the strip outside town, not far down from a seedy motel with a flickering sign, in front of a darkened dollar store. Lee knows the number by heart — checks every now and again to make sure it hasn’t changed.

Three rings, then: “Hello?” says a sleepy voice at the other end of the call.

Lee hangs up. He hands Dean back his extra quarter. “Not dead,” he says, ‘cause Dean’s watching him like he actually wants to know.

Dean nods. “Come on, man,” he says, scratching uncomfortably at the symbols still visible on his neck, above the collar of his jacket. “I gotta get this shit off me.”

He nods toward the motel.

\---

Dean disappears into the shower. Lee cracks open a bottle of whiskey and stitches up his own side.

It’s a shallow gash — nothing serious. Twin of the one he got the first time he ran into Dean on a hunt. He laughs at that.

When Dean emerges, steam clinging to him and a towel slung around his hips, his chest is free of marks. Lee’s glad to see it — he wasn’t all the way sure the blood smeared on Dean’s body wasn’t his own.

Like he knows what Lee’s thinking, Dean makes a face. “Witches, man. Bodily fluids everywhere. Fuckin’ disgusting.”

He changes without shame — bare-assed, bending over his duffel to retrieve jeans, a t-shirt, a pair of boxers he inspects doubtfully before pulling them on. Lee watches, ‘cause he ain’t exactly about to look away.

When he’s dressed, Dean drops onto the bed beside Lee and points to his wound. “Hey, let me see that.”

Lee obliges, raising his arm, and Dean runs a careful finger over the stitches. “Good,” he concedes, drawing back. When Lee drops his arm, their fingers brush, and neither of them pulls away.

“How’d you get out of those cuffs, anyway?” Dean asks, leaning back. He’s got the remote in his other hand, the one that’s not sharing heat with Lee’s. He turns on the TV and flips through channels. “Guess I shoulda checked you for picks.”

Lee snorts. He tries not to imagine Dean patting him down — palms on his sides, his ass. Sinking down on his knees to cover Lee’s legs — the insides of his thighs.

“Car antenna,” he says.

“Car antenna! Jesus,” Dean echoes. “Gotta remember that one.”

“Good thing for you you didn’t,” Lee points out.

“I had it handled,” Dean scoffs, but he’s grinning, eyes catching Lee’s, like he’s in on the joke.

Lee’s chest clenches. He ignores it. “Where’s your dad and Sammy, anyway?”

The humor in Dean’s face drops. When he looks at the TV again, his jaw is set hard. “Stanford. Sammy, I mean. Dad’s —”

Lee sees it, the twist of his mouth, the words that almost spill out of it: _fuck if I know._

“Ohio. I think. Last he checked in.”

He doesn’t say how long ago that was.

It’s October, Lee thinks; partway through the fall semester. Dean’s a long way from California.

“I’m sorry, man,” he murmurs.

Lee’s been alone a good while. He likes being alone. But it sucks sometimes, remembering what it mighta felt like: someone else to watch your back.

If Lee hadn’t got free of those cuffs tonight, Dean might be —

“I ain’t selling anymore.”

Dean fires the words hard, hits Lee right in the throat.

His face is crimson. He’s staring Lee down, refusing to blink, but the flush is on his neck, too; in the brightness of his eyes. His fingers tighten on the bedspread.

Their skin brushes, again.

The contact travels through Lee like an electric spark. Up his arm and down his ribs, lancing his chest, raising goosebumps on his skin. And down, too, heat pooling in his groin, ‘cause Dean’s — looking at him. Looking at him like a challenge, like a promise, like a plea — like he’s gonna look at Lee and keep looking at Lee ‘til he can’t see his own demons. ‘Til all the ghosts that aren’t ghosts fade away.

Lee swallows. His mouth is dry. He reaches instinctively for the whiskey bottle, tips it back in a long pull.

When he’s done, Dean’s turning away. Face twisting now with the misery of rejection.

Lee passes him the bottle.

Dean takes it blindly. Tilts his head back and drinks long, throat working, gold and dark and gorgeous in the shadow of the bedside light.

When he’s done, he’s breathing hard. Still avoiding Lee’s eyes. He raises a hand to wipe his mouth.

Lee catches it by the wrist.

“Honey,” he says, “I ain’t buyin’.”

Dean freezes.

Then he sets the whiskey bottle carefully on the floor.

\---

Dean yanks his t-shirt over his head. Lee wrestles with the fly of his jeans.

They clash together half-complete. Dean’s shirt still tangled at his wrists, Lee’s pants shoved half down his thighs. The arch of Dean’s ribcage is suddenly more than he can take; he needs to touch, needs the hard curve of Dean’s hipbone and the whiskey still shining on his mouth.

He makes a sound in his throat that’s halfway a growl and lurches Dean back on the bed. It’s clumsy; he’s hobbled by his own jeans, half-falling on Dean as he tries to cover him up, but Dean goes with it. Grinds up on Lee’s dick with a denim-clad thigh and tips back his head so Lee’s mouth falls on his throat instead of banging bloody against his chin.

Lee groans and bites Dean’s collarbone. Dean’s breathing fast, struggling to free his hands, and Lee gets his shit the fuck together and pins them, trapped behind Dean’s back — grips Dean’s hips and presses them down.

Dean’s chest flutters madly as Lee bites his way down it. He’s hard in his jeans, straining desperately for friction against the vise Lee has on his hips, but Lee doesn’t grant it. Dean _whines,_ rutting against his own zipper, and Lee reaches between his legs to press a quelling palm against the hard line of his dick.

Air gusts explosively out of Dean’s lungs. He falls back limp against the bed, and then, when Lee shifts so he can curl his fingers down around the shape of Dean’s balls through thick denim, gasps, “ _Naked_ — fucking — please —”

Lee slides back up the length of Dean’s body, smiling at the hitch in Dean’s breath when he thumbs open the button of his fly. “What was that?” he murmurs, and covers Dean’s mouth with his own before he can answer; tastes whiskey, licks inside, swallows down the urgent exclamation that escapes Dean’s throat.

When he pulls back, Dean’s eyes are wide and glassy, pupils blown enormous with lust. He tries again to grind up into Lee’s hand, and Lee squeezes to stop him, sending Dean’s breath haywire. He gasps and clamps his eyes shut and then seems to realize what Lee’s after, because he opens them and latches onto Lee’s gaze like a drowning man and chokes out, “ _Please._ Please, I need — fucking —”

Lee catches Dean’s earlobe between his teeth. The hinge of Dean’s jaw. “What do you need?”

Breath gusts hard out of Dean’s lungs. “Whatever you want. Whatever you fucking — _please.”_

Lee unzips his fly.

He can feel the vibration of the whine in Dean’s throat, not quite making it to air; clamps down and sucks a hickey where it stops. Dean cants desperate hips, and this time Lee allows it — shoves Dean’s pants down, boxers and all, and takes him in his hand.

“ _Fuck,_ ” gasps Dean. “Shit, fuck —”

Lee shuts him up with his mouth.

And then he’s inching back on the bed, scooting lower. Working his way down Dean’s chest, his belly, the fine trail of hair there, and then —

With a hum of satisfaction low in his throat, he takes Dean in his mouth.

For an airless moment, Dean goes perfectly still.

His muscles are trembling — his belly, his thighs. He’s got his hands free somehow, and they hover at Lee’s shoulder, at the side of his face, as if to say — _No, not that. No, I don’t —_

Then his shoulders slump backward and he thrusts up helplessly and Lee grins around his dick and swallows it down.

He tastes good. Clean, from the shower, and faintly musky; Lee’s nose brushes against the curls around the root, and he inhales.

The weight in his mouth feels good. The nudge against the back of his throat; the way Dean trembles as he tries not to thrust, to choke Lee. The vein jumping against Lee’s tongue. His jaw aches a little from the stretch, not unpleasantly; he hums again and works a hand between Dean’s legs, slides fingers up to stroke behind his balls.

Dean cries out, legs twisting and falling open, and Lee hollows his cheeks and begins in earnest, sliding off Dean’s dick with a wet _pop,_ back down again like he’s starving.

It’s been a while since he’s done this. He doesn’t think his technique is half bad, but he’s not practiced — probably not as practiced as Dean is. Maybe he expects Dean to be an old hand, cynical, unimpressed.

What he gets is Dean spread helpless on the bed. Chest flushed and sweat shining on his skin. Legs working a slow torturous dance to spread wider, toes gripping at Lee’s shoulders, the bedspread. When Lee gets the idea and slides a spit-slick finger down between Dean’s asscheeks — when he finds the bud of muscle and presses back, up, in — Dean’s lips part and his eyes squeeze shut and he sucks in shallow breaths, dick twitching and swelling against Lee’s tongue.

When Lee starts to match the bob of his head with slow thrusts, speeding, twisting deeper, Dean comes undone.

His fingers are trembling at the hinge of Lee’s jaw. Curling in his hair and halting just shy of pulling, curving around the back of his skull. He flattens palms against Lee’s cheeks like he can feel himself through them, and he probably _can;_ Lee hums again and Dean chokes silently, arching, digging down on Lee’s finger as he comes, and comes, and comes.

Lee swallows, once, twice. His mouth tastes salty and warm; his own dick is aching hard enough to white out the corners of his vision. He pulls off with a _pop,_ and Dean’s grappling ineffectively at his shoulders, trying to pull him closer, hooking his heels around Lee’s waist to draw him in.

Lee presses them gently free.

He slides up Dean’s body to kiss him — thrusts his tongue into Dean’s mouth, breath hot with the taste of his come. Dean whimpers and tries again to move, squirming down between Lee’s legs, and Lee stops him by hooking a thumb in his mouth. He lets Dean clamp down on it for a moment, sucking, then frees it and takes Dean’s hands again, crossing his wrists, to pin them against the pillow over his head.

With his free hand he jerks off hard and fast. It doesn’t take much; he’s teetering on the edge already, driven half out of his mind. He comes with a shuddering, soundless cry, striping white across Dean’s chest, his throat.

For a moment, ears buzzing, he just stares down at what he’s wrought. _Damn,_ if that ain’t a picture — he’ll need to hold onto that. Keep it ready for the next lonely motel room, the next shitty-ass town down the line.

Then Dean opens his eyes and glares at him.

Lee falls apart laughing.

He’s on his side in the bed, cackling, leg still locked across Dean’s hips, and Dean’s struggling to sit up — groping for Lee’s shirt to wipe himself down in retaliation. He finds it, scrubs roughly over his neck, down his sternum, across his chest — _pity_ — then throws the sodden fabric at Lee’s face. Lee yelps, barely catching it, and grimaces as he deposits it off the side of the bed. “Your fucking _face,_ man,” he chokes, and Dean pinches viciously at the nerve in his thigh and fires back, “Guess I should be glad you didn’t go for the fucking money shot —”

Only his voice falters a little on that, cheeks flushing, and Lee hears what he isn’t saying.

He rolls back over so they’re nose to nose, and rests his palm on Dean’s jaw. “You’d like that, huh,” he murmurs, gliding a thumb across Dean’s cheekbone, and for a moment Dean looks caught in it — glassy.

Then he elbows Lee’s ribs and mutters a resigned, “Fuck off,” and Lee laughs and rolls off the bed to go brush his teeth.

\---

“Sorry,” Lee tells Dean later. “I distracted you. From your date.”

He’s grinning when he says it. Not apologizing at all. But Dean frowns, confused. “What date?”

“Girl at the bar? Witness? Gave you her number?”

“Oh.” Dean colors. “That, uh — not her number. Book recommendation. A, uh, Vonnegut novel she thought I’d like.”

Lee studies him.

“I mean it’s no big fucking deal,” Dean mutters.

“If she’s giving you _book recommendations,”_ Lee tells him, “you could probably get a date.”

“Yeah, well.”

Lee takes that for a satisfactory answer. He rolls over and slings an arm across Dean’s ribs.

Dean freezes up for a moment. Long enough that Lee wonders if he’s fucked up.

Then he relaxes into the touch, and within a few minutes, he’s snoring.

\---

Dean wakes Lee up with a blow job that melts his brains right out of his skull.

Lee gets his money shot.

Then they drive around until they find a likely car for Lee to wire. Dean waits for the engine to cough to life. Offers Lee a salute and a crooked smile.

They drive off in opposite directions, and it’s another year and three months before they see each other again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy almost-Christmas!
> 
> Title from [Hand Back Down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6yQYa2-3sU) by The Devil Makes Three.


	3. Four Good Wheels

It’s John Winchester, this time, that Lee spots in a bar, and for once none of that goddamn family are stealing a hunt out from under him; he’s resting up, shooting pool and padding out his funds and giving a bum ankle some time to heal. John toasts him from the bar and Lee makes his way over, spends a few minutes shooting the shit before he works around to, “How’re the kids, anyway?”

John’s face tightens. “Younger one’s off at college,” he answers gruffly. “Dean’s around somewhere — should be here soon.”

Lee pretends his pulse doesn’t jump a beat.

He’s not actually sure how Dean’ll react to seeing him — that last time ended up in a pretty fan-fucking-tastic detente, but Dean might still hate him, a little bit. If he does — if it bugs Dean at all, what went down in Virginia — well, it’s probably gonna bug him that Lee’s sitting here shooting the shit with John Winchester knowing exactly what his son looks like with come smeared all over his gorgeous fucking face.

So he’s careful, when Dean shows up. Doesn’t rib him too hard; doesn’t grin at him too wide. Dean goes kind of still when he sees Lee there at the bar, whatever he’s thinking shuttered up behind his eyes, and so a couple beers later when John goes to take a leak and Dean puts a hand across Lee’s back and mutters, “Come on,” Lee’s not exactly sure if they’re heading out behind the bar to fight, or talk, or — what.

He doesn’t expect Dean to spin him, back against the wall, and stick a cigarette between Lee’s lips. He sparks a lighter with his thumb, grin busting open wide, and the next moment he’s dropping to his knees and yanking Lee’s jeans open at the fly.

He blows Lee hard and fast and ruthless, deep-throating him and sucking down air through his nose, and Lee clings on for dear life. Tries to keep the cigarette in his mouth. When he comes shaking and slumps wrung out against the wall, Dean zips him up, rises gracefully, and plucks the cigarette free. He gives Lee a wide, devilish grin and takes one long drag himself, a second, then crushes the cigarette under his boot.

“Where were you boys?” John asks, when they slide back into their seats at the bar.

“Smoke break,” Dean lies easily. There’s a light burr in his voice that wasn’t there before; Lee swallows.

John frowns. “I don’t want you doing that shit. Bad for your lungs. I can’t worry about you not being able to keep up, Dean.”

“Yes, sir.” Dean winks broadly at Lee around John’s back.

“Got a string of hunts lined up,” John’s saying. “Here to Cheyenne — few different towns. What do you say, want to join us?”

Lee’s ankle’s still a little shaky. Nothing he can’t run on, probably. He finds his mouth saying, “Sure.”

\---

Fucking around behind John Winchester’s back is a little bit terrifying and a hell of a lot thrilling.

They trade hasty hand jobs in diner bathrooms, motel showers, the back seat of Lee’s car. Behind a morgue, once, with the stink of chemicals making Lee light-headed and Dean’s teeth latching onto the skin of his neck. They nearly get caught about eight times over, but every time Lee thinks _shit, we should maybe stop this,_ Dean is on him and he forgets to think altogether for a while.

“So you and the old man are hunting together again?” he tries to ask one time, in the brief window between when they both come gasping and when they need to shift back to acting like they’ve been hard at work on research the whole time.

The self-satisfied smile flickers on Dean’s face. He gives a one-shoulder shrug. “Maybe. For a while.”

Lee takes the cigarette Dean offers. “What’s a while?”

“‘Til he’s sick of company again, I guess.”

It comes in Cheyenne. They’ve been resting up for a day or two, checking mailboxes for credit card offers, splitting up to cover the pool halls. Lee runs into John at one of them but only gives him the barest nod; plays a round and lets John beat him to sucker in the half-interested rubes hanging around the bar.

Later he sees John chatting with a guy out in the parking lot. Studying the guy’s pickup; opening up the toolbox, inspecting the rims. He nods to his own car — it’s a black ‘67 Impala, fucking beauty — and grins like a shark. The two of them shake hands.

Shit. Lee’d better get ready for a fight.

Two sets of keys on the rail; the truck owner smiles like he means business. For a minute Lee thinks John’s got it lost.

Turns out, Dean learned his technique somewhere.

The guy’s face is purple with anger; John moves around him to take the keys. Tosses them to Lee, and they’re running; they tear out of the parking lot spitting gravel. Steam down the highway and double back two exits down from their own, ducking back into the unlit back corner of the motel parking lot. John’s grinning broadly when he slides from the Impala’s front seat. He claps Lee on the shoulder. “Well played, son.”

 _I ain’t your son,_ Lee thinks, but he grins back as he passes John the keys.

Dean isn’t back yet. They split a sixpack and lounge in the Winchesters’ motel room to flick between shitty reruns. John’s laughing, telling stories about the old days, a light in his face and crinkles around his eyes.

When Dean lets himself in around two in the morning, the look on his face — eyebrows raised, mouth quirking — says he’s already seen the truck. “Where the hell are you even gonna sell that thing?”

John shrugs, grinning. Dean fights his own smile a moment longer, then gives it up. And he’s digging into his own pocket, counting out a wad of bills. “I mean, if you want some _practical_ winnings —”

Half of them are crisp hundreds. “That’s my boy,” John says, satisfaction rendering him almost indulgent, and Lee shakes his head and laughs.

In the morning Lee finds Dean sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at a note.

It’s coordinates — somewhere in Michigan. A few lines scribbled underneath: _Headed to Alabama. Happy birthday._

Cupped in Dean’s hand are the Impala’s keys.

He looks up at Lee with a terrible blankness in his eyes; it shutters, a moment later, and Dean gives him a half-assed grin. Lee asks, “It’s your birthday?”

Dean’s expression flickers. “Couple days ago.”

Lee sits beside him. “How old?”

It seems to take a moment for Dean to understand the question. He frowns, then answers, “Twenty-four.”

Lee snorts. “And you were twenty-one when we met. Sure.”

Dean glances up in surprise, then laughs; a little more genuine this time. “What about you, old man?”

Lee’s used to lying; he doesn’t this time. “Thirty in March.” He leans back, watches Dean’s eyes track down to where his shirt rides up at his hips.

When Dean pivots off the bed, though, starts sinking down to his knees, it doesn’t feel right. “Hey, now,” Lee says, cupping his jaw. “We got time for that. What d’you say we take your lady for a spin?”

\---

They get on the interstate; speed out toward the horizon. Town doesn’t take long to drop away, and then it’s just rolling sagebrush and rocky hills, clusters of pines huddled on their northern flanks.

“I wasn’t really a SEAL,” Lee tells Dean, after they’ve been driving half an hour or so. It’s the only gift he can think to offer: a little sliver of truth. “Wanted to be, when I was a kid. Dropped out of the Navy twice.”

Dean snorts. “Twice?”

Lee grins back at him. “Deserted once. I was underage anyway. Dishonorable discharge, second time ‘round.”

This time Dean’s laugh sounds genuine. “Dishonorable? You?”

Lee raises his eyebrows — smirks. Dean swallows.

They shift lanes to blow by a semi, hazards flashing as it climbs a rise. Overhead, ravens tumble in the sky, cawing without a sound. The snow is blown clear of the hilltops, huddled in smooth white curves where it’s sheltered from the wind.

“How’d you get into this shit anyway?” Dean asks. “Hunting, I mean?”

It takes a moment for Lee to pull his thoughts back together enough to answer. He shrugs. “Had a run-in with a nasty when I was sixteen. Saw some gnarly shit; killed the thing somehow. Figured if that stuff was out there I’d better learn to fight for real.”

Dean glances sharply at him; long enough for the pavement to thrum a warning at his wheels. He corrects back inside the white line. “What about your brother?”

“What about him?”

The question seems to take Dean by surprise. His shoulders hunch a little and he says, “I mean did he — did your family — are they —”

“None of ‘em believed a goddamn thing about it.” Lee tries to smile; it feels like a snarl. Then he says, like he hasn’t said to anyone, not ever: “Tried to tell me I’d gone crazy. Locked me up in a psych ward.”

“Jesus,” Dean breathes. Then, after a moment: “I’m sorry, man.”

Lee shrugs. “No big deal. Got out, got a fake ID, went to be a military man —” he pronounces the _m_ ’s with relish — “and here I am. What about you?”

Dean shrugs. “Mom died when I was four. Dad’s been chasing the thing that did it ever since.”

Lee studies him. “He raised you boys on the road?”

Another shrug that’s half a nod.

A thought occurs to Lee, and he frowns. “How old was Sammy? When it happened?”

“‘Bout six months.” Dean taps a finger on the steering wheel, as if to music that isn’t playing. “It was in his room. I — I carried him out.”

Which means he saw it happen. Lee sighs, tired suddenly, a little sick at the thought of the years stretched out behind Dean: the number of times he must’ve woken up in a chilly motel room with nothing but a piece of paper where he should’ve had a dad.

Lee’s had a shit life, maybe, but at least he chose it. Eyes wide open, bile burning vicious in his throat.

They’re quiet for a while. Then Lee picks up the cardboard box in the wheel well by his feet and starts sorting through cassettes — snorting and setting them aside. “ _Real_ music,” he proclaims finally, letting the Texas dig its hooks in his voice, and Dean snorts and then starts laughing outright when Merle Haggard’s voice warbles out over the speakers.

_We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee —_   
_We don't take our trips on LSD_   
_We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street_   
_We like livin' right, and bein' free..._

Dean’s shaking his head, but he’s smiling too — a little rueful, a little reckless. Like maybe driving his dad’s car listening to his dad’s music doesn’t feel quite right. Not yet.

“ _I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,”_ Lee sings. _“A place where even squares can have a ball —”_

“Dude,” Dean snorts, “pretty sure you are the _opposite_ of this song.”

“Hey,” says Lee, “I never had a draft card to burn.” And then, “ _Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear —”_

Dean chokes laughing.

“ _Everybody!_ ” Lee calls out along with Merle, and Dean’s still laughing but he’s shaking his head, refusing to sing along. “Come on, boy,” Lee needles, grinning. “ _I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee —”_

Dean grips the steering wheel with one hand and flips him off with the other, grinning. As the cheers on the live track fade, Lee turns the volume down to ask over it, “Come on, what’s the problem? You shy, Winchester?”

The next chords are starting. Dean’s still grinning and shaking his head. “— your country crap, Webb,” he’s saying, but Lee’s not listening anymore ‘cause he fucking _loves this song._

He closes his eyes. Puts up a finger to silence Dean, and for a wonder, it actually works.

“ _First thing I remember knowin’ was a lonesome whistle blowin’, and a young’un’s dream of growing up to ride —”_

He puts his back into it this time. Shuts out the world and tries to match the butter in Merle’s voice, leans into his own rasp.

_“And I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole, no one could steer me right but Mama tried —”_

When he cracks an eye open Dean’s watching him instead of the road. “Dude, you’re _good,”_ he says. “Dunno what you’re doing hunting — you could be a fucking rock star.”

Lee winks at him. “Rock star, huh? You’d like that?”

“Fuck yeah.” Dean grins. “Always wanted to be a rock star when I was a kid.”

“What happened?”

That earns him an incredulous look, between glances at the road — _the hell do you mean, what happened?_ But then Dean smiles and lies easily, “Didn’t have the pipes.”

The words hang there for a beat as the song dies. Then Lee starts laughing.

“Fuckin’ liar,” he snorts. “Bet you sing like an angel —”

And Dean’s laughing too, protesting over him, “No, seriously — you should see me at karaoke — Sammy banned me from lullabies when he was like, three years old —”

“What, you need rock music? We’ll get you some rock music,” Lee commands. He sorts through the tape box, clacking them together. “The fuck even is this shit — _Jon Bon Jovi._ You a _Jon Bon Jovi_ fan, Dean?”

Dean’s laughing helpless, protesting weakly, and Lee slams the tape into the deck. Jams fast forward for a moment before letting it go. _“I’m a cowboy,”_ he sings, _“on a steel horse I ride —”_

“Frickin,” Dean chokes, “glam rock —”

 _“I’m wanted,”_ Lee answers, wagging a finger at him. _“Dead or alive.”_

Dean rolls his eyes to the heavens. _“Wanted,”_ he belts out tunelessly on the reprise, _“dead or alive!”_

 _You are so full of shit, Dean Winchester,_ Lee thinks, but he lets it go.

For now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "[Wheels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPwj4ZYgeYA)" by The Devil Makes Three.


	4. Ain't You Handsome When You're High

Lee figures they’ll hang around Cheyenne another night, maybe two. Drink and dick around and have a lot of awesome sex. When they pull back into the motel, though, Dean lets the door of his room bang and gape open. Shoves some clothes in his duffel, glances into the bathroom and scoops up some rounds of loose ammo scattered on the sink.

Lee raises his eyebrows. “You got someone’s husband coming after you?”

“Not unless you got some explaining to do,” Dean answers, distracted. “Pass me that machete, will you? Gotta get moving for Michigan.” He pats his pocket, the one where he slipped the note.

“Says who?” Lee sits down on the bed, letting the mattress rock beneath him. “Your old man’s not here. Take a day. Hell, take two.”

Dean glances over at him again. His mouth quirks, lopsided, like Lee’s said something funny. “Gotta get to Michigan,” he says again.

Lee blows out a long breath, sticking out his lower lip so it gusts at his hair where it hangs in his eyes. “All right, well. Been a while since I hit Motor City. Wouldn’t mind a reunion tour.”

A sidelong glance. “You comin’?”

“Why the hell not.”

He doesn’t think he imagines Dean hiding a smile.

\---

Lee’s current beater is still at the bar where John won his truck. When they get to it, the windows are smashed in, paint keyed and the tires slashed. Lee shrugs philosophically and retrieves his gear from the trunk — that at least is unbreached. “Been looking for a new ride anyway,” he tells Dean.

Hunting with Winchesters sure is doing a number on the shelf life of Lee’s cars.

Couldn’t have planned it better if he tried, though. ‘Cause this means he’s got the whole eighteen-hour ride to watch Dean make love to his best girl.

How Dean feels about the Impala is apparent in every glance he gives her, every touch. His fingertips resting on the steering wheel and the leather of his seat. The way he flexes the pedal to make her purr, or buffs away salt splash on her metal every time they stop for gas.

Might be enough to make Lee jealous, if he were the jealous type.

Instead, he digs through the cassette tape collection and finds _Physical Graffiti._ Gets “Trampled Under Foot” on the speakers and laughs when Dean groans and flushes, then cracks up — _Mama, let me pump your gas — mama, let me do it all —_

“Don’t get me wrong,” Lee grins, winding his voice through the thump of the bass, “gettin’ me all hot and bothered, watchin’ you and your Baby here — man could start to feel left out, though.”

Which is how he winds up giving Dean road head, zipping his jeans open and swallowing him down. Pressing Dean’s hips down until he can feel the thrum of the pavement through the seat, laughing when Dean swears violently and clamps his fingers in Lee’s hair. “Jesus,” Dean chokes a moment later, “there’s a fucking _cop,_ ” and Lee flattens himself to the leather, cold zipper biting his lip.

A few minutes later and Dean’s coming, breath hitching wildly and thighs shaking with the effort of keeping the pressure steady on the gas. Lee swallows neatly, then sits up and licks his lips and grins.

“I’m gonna fucking kill you,” Dean tells him weakly. “Fucking —”

“Hey, now,” Lee admonishes him. “Don’t let your baby hear you talking like that.”

Dean mutters, “And you say _I’m_ weird about my car.”

\---

They crash for the night outside Omaha, mostly because Lee sees a neon sign looming alongside an exit and grabs Dean’s arm. “Dude, pull off here — this joint frickin’ _rocks._ Swayze motherfuckin’-ass shit —”

And he’s not wrong. Bar’s got an honest-to-god metal screen protecting the band from shattering beer bottles, straight out of _Road House,_ and they’ve been inside all of thirty seconds when a voice growls, “Lee motherfucking Webb,” and he barely ducks a pool cue breaking across his skull.

“Jesus fuck,” says Dean, and hurls himself at Lee’s assailant.

The brawl spills them back out the double doors and into the parking lot — vicious and dirty, elbows flying and grunted curses and a knee to Lee’s face, once, but he dodges it barely and socks the guy in the gut. He can hear himself laughing, can hear the crack of a fist on a skull and Dean cursing again, and then Lee spins and nails his current opponent in the kneecap and the guy drops.

It gives him a moment to see what’s going on with Dean — he’s between two guys now, one of them wrapping beefy arms around his waist from behind, the other trying to dodge his flying kicks long enough to land a punch — and Lee’s just about to wade in there when Dean gets the opening he’s looking for. His legs are a vice, knees locking on either side of his attacker’s neck, and then he’s twisting for leverage — breaking the first guy’s grip and flipping him to the ground even as the second guy chokes and grapples for air.

Lee’s sorta tempted to just hang back and watch Dean work. He wades in because it’s the gentlemanly thing to do.

It doesn’t take long after that to run them off. In the aftermath, Dean straightens his shirt and shakes his head. “You lunatic,” he says. “What the hell did you do?”

Lee grins at him, brushing his hair from his eyes and wiping blood off a split lip. “In this case — motherfucker might be a tiny bit literal.”

Dean chokes. Lee claps him on the back and leads the way back inside.

\---

The band remembers Lee.

The bartender does too.

The night passes in a blur — glimpses Lee barely remembers in the morning. Tearing his voice up out on the stage; Dean leaning against a wall watching with a beer in his hand and a private sort of smile on his lips. Shots of whiskey burning at his throat; leaping off the stage and stumbling, cracking his knees against the hardwood floor. Broad hands pulling him up, turning too-close to green-hazel eyes.

He remembers calling out to the band, “‘Like a Virgin’ — you boys know it?” He remembers Dean groaning, “Oh no,” head tipped back and palms easy on Lee’s ribs in a way that made Lee want to lick into his mouth then and there; he remembers leaning close and murmuring in Dean’s ear instead, “You love the eighties.”

He’s pretty sure the band _didn’t_ know it. He’s entirely sure it don’t matter. ‘Cause Lee’s — well — when he gets an idea in his head —

There’s a lot of shit Lee ain’t good at. But this — right amount of whiskey in his belly, and he can be a fucking spellcaster. Dream the night into color all around him.

The bartender — what’s her name, Cady? Casey? — she knows. Lee remembers the spark in her eyes, familiar from last time, the tip of her chin — _your boy in?_ Remembers singing to her and just to her, maybe a glimpse of some dancing on top of the bar —

Remembers the door of the back room banging closed behind him, slamming against it, breath huffing out of his chest. A tangle of hands and mouths and clothing; Dean, bare-chested, falling back on the sagging sofa, and Casey straddling him, Lee crowding in behind her. Laughter turning to gasps.

He rolls over in the Impala’s back seat. The sun through the window stabs his eyes.

Lee swears, and barely gets the door open in time to not vomit all over the upholstery.

From the front seat, Dean groans loudly. “If you’re makin’ a mess of my Baby —”

Through the wave of nausea, Lee feels a little spike of triumph that the nickname stuck.

It takes a while for his intestines to stop trying to crawl out his mouth and abandon ship. Dean seems to be faring better, if only a little. When at least Lee can turn over on his back, panting, he manages, “Great fuckin’ night though, man.”

Dean groans, then concedes: “Great fuckin’ night.”

\---

Michigan’s a standard enough case. Factory haunting; gets a little gnarly toward the end there but they keep the body count down. After, Dean’s shaking off a strained wrist and Lee’s a bit bruised and battered, but for once a hunt with a Winchester hasn’t left him slashed open anywhere, and he’s counting that as a win.

The town’s not actually that close to Detroit — three hours or so north and west — and Dean concedes to drive Lee in for his pick of the litter. “Motor City,” Lee tells him again. “Best place in the world to steal cars. Plus, I know a couple good joints for live music —”

“If you try and break out Madonna again,” says Dean, “I will _end_ you.”

He’s smiling as he says it, but there’s something distant in his eyes. A brittleness at the corner of his mouth. He’s in some kinda mood today, keeps checking his phone like he’s looking for another text from his dad, instructions, coordinates, maybe even a _good job, son._ Far as Lee can tell, there’s nothing.

He lets it go. “You kidding? This is Seger town. _Workin’ on my night moves_ —”

“Your night moves _need_ work,” Dean gripes, shoving lightly at Lee’s shoulder.

They lapse into quiet again for a while, thirty miles or more. Zeppelin playing low on the tape deck. Lee watches the trees and farms and strip mall towns go by and wonders if he should steal a motorcycle.

“The other day,” Dean says finally. “In Cheyenne.”

Lee looks up.

“Guy at the pool hall wouldn’t stop asking for a fuck.”

There’s something complicated living in his eyes. Self-loathing crossed with a kind of vicious satisfaction, like it’s a wound that feels good to lance.

“Told him my going rate was a thousand bucks. Figured he’d fuck off quick after that. But, y’know. He didn’t.”

Sympathy makes Lee slouch in his seat. He works his shoulderblades against the Impala’s leather; it feels good through his shirt. He sort of wishes he’d been there. “You have to fight ‘im?”

Dean glances up sharply; then his mouth twists. “Dude. He paid the thousand.”

It takes a moment for that to sink in; another for Lee to work out how he’s meant to react.

Except it doesn’t, because he can’t help himself. Starts laughing and then he can’t stop, ribs shaking, eyes streaming — “Thousand-dollar ass, huh?” he’s asking, and Dean’s grinning, swatting his hand away — “Damn, brother, _you_ are in the wrong line of work —”

“Fuck off,” says Dean, but he’s laughing, catching Lee’s finger and bending it back at the knuckle. “Fuck you, Webb.”

“I mean, I would,” Lee tells him seriously, “but I might have to dip into my trust fund, you know.”

He yelps when Dean bends his finger harder. There’s a brief scuffle, car swerving in the road, that ends with Lee’s face in the leather and Dean’s knuckles scrubbing his scalp.

“A friggin’ _noogie?_ That’s dark, man,” Lee manages a moment later, smoothing his hair back into place as he sits up. “See if I can muster the pride to fuck _anyone_ after that.”

“I mean, though.” Dean’s a little flushed, runs his hand over the hair at the back of his neck. “Would you?”

“You know I don’t have a trust fund, right?”

“No, like.” But the words or the courage run out, and he raises a middle finger instead.

Lee looks at him more carefully — assessing. “You’d like that?”

Dean rolls his eyes.

More quietly, Lee says, “You gotta use your words, boy.”

Dean’s face is crimson. “Yeah,” he answers, finally. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

“Well all right then.”

Lee sits back to watch Dean squirm and scowl the rest of the way to Detroit.

\---

In the end, though, they don’t make it to the city at all.

Lee sees it outside a gas station as the sky’s getting dark: pretty little Ducati bike, black leather smooth as sin. “Dude,” says Dean, “you’re gonna get us arrested,” and then, “What happened to Motor City? That shit’s not even American made —”

It doesn’t matter. Half an hour later and they’re tearing hell for leather down country roads, spitting gravel into the dried up cornfields. There are sirens in the distance, off toward the highway. Over the roar of his engine, Lee can’t tell if they’re getting closer.

God, he feels fucking _alive._

He spins to a stop at a crossroad. Kicks out the bike’s stand and meets Dean halfway out his own car door. “Hey, we should split up — I can hide in the corn if I’ve got to. I’ll meet you in —”

But Dean’s got one of his looks on his face, his phone in his hand. “My dad wants help in Alabama.”

“What, now?”

It’s a dumb question. It cracks Dean’s face into a look of faint amusement, though. Are the sirens getting closer?

Dean’s voice is low; he sways forward. “Rain check on that — thing?”

Lee can’t drive a stolen bike to Alabama overnight. Not without some time to lay low, change out the plates.

He could ditch it. Slide back in with Dean and leave Michigan behind.

He doesn’t.

“Rain check,” he agrees. Then he grabs Dean’s face with one hand and pulls him close and kisses him.

Dean makes a startled noise in his throat. Then his lips part and he’s kissing Lee back, sweet and slow.

It takes a moment to pull back from that. The sky is darkening on them, threatening to spit rain. Lee thumbs Dean’s cheekbone.

Then he grins. “See you around, Bonnie.”

He’s already swinging a leg back over his seat, gunning the throttle, when Dean yells after him over the roar, “You are _not_ fucking Clyde!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "[Chase the Feeling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVU0WjM3lDQ)" by The Devil Makes Three.


	5. For Good Again

Lee sort of starts to take his research more seriously after that.

Keeps an eye out for hunts that look Winchester-y. Drops by Harvelle’s a couple times, listening in on the hunter gossip, until he finally works around to asking Ellen if she knows anything about John or Dean.

Her mouth flattens. “Winchesters don’t come around here.” And she doesn’t say any more.

Which raises the question: where do Winchesters go?

So Lee floats west. He could use some sunny skies and warm weather, anyhow.

The Stanford campus is like nothing he’s ever seen. Palm trees everywhere, sandstone buildings with red shingle roofs. There’s a fuckton of columns. _Colonnades,_ or whatever.

He lounges on a bench between two of them and watches the tour groups go by.

It’s hard to envision what Sam Winchester might look like now — the one he met was indelibly fifteen. Taller, Lee guesses; he had that growth spurt look about him. And the hair —

Shit, son of a Marine, finally rebelling and living alone? Kid’s probably got hair down past his shoulders by now.

“Hey, man.” Lee blinks and there’s a kid standing in front of him, twenty-one maybe, with dark hair and thick eyebrows and gloriously suntanned arms. He’s dressed in a polo shirt, one hand outstretched toward Lee, and in it there’s a five-dollar bill. “Buy yourself some food, all right?”

It takes Lee a moment to comprehend; then he scowls, sitting up. “What do you think, I’m fucking homeless?”

The kid pales under his tan. “I —”

“Fuck you,” Lee snaps. “Get the fuck outta here — you want the shit beat out of you?”

His would-be good samaritan retracts his hand and takes off at a quick walk, almost a jog, glancing over his shoulder as he goes.

Lee sighs. He’s drawing stares. He moves on too.

He finds Sammy two days later — towering over a pretty blonde on the steps of his dorm. She says something, grinning up at him, and he turns beet red and rubs the back of his neck.

His hair’s not as long as Lee guessed, but it is a messy mop. He carries four massive textbooks in a backpack that strains at the seams. The girl’s name is Jessica; they’ve been dating three weeks. He’s pre-law.

Lee hangs around Palo Alto for nearly two months.

He tries driving out to Santa Cruz some days. Hangs around the beach, hoping to pull a Keanu and find some hot chick to teach him to surf; when that doesn’t work out, he tries doing it himself. It’s a mistake — the water’s fucking _cold._ The Bay Area, Lee figures out, is not LA.

He doesn’t think too hard about what he’s doing here, or what Dean’s gonna say if he ever shows up; he doesn’t think about the nasties he isn’t out there killing. He makes a routine of swinging by Sam’s dorm at prime surveillance hours. Doing a round of the pool halls. Keeping an eye out for a big black ‘67 Impala with Kansas plates.

By the time Dean shows up, Lee’s almost stopped looking for him.

\---

It’s not in the alley behind Sam’s dorm. It’s not even at the Lucky Shot or Antonio’s Nut House. It’s all the way out by the beach, one of those surfer bars, and Dean’s leaning back in a booth, arms spread, easy as you please, chatting up a pretty little blonde.

Lee comes in the back door, like he usually does; gives him a chance to survey the crowd. Still, it’s packed that night, and it’s only when Lee’s halfway across the floor that he double-takes — stops dead in his tracks.

“Son of a bitch,” he breathes, and somehow, past three rows of shoulders, Dean’s eyes find him.

His face goes blank, then flushed, then careful. Eyes narrowing, emotion buttoning down.

He straightens in his seat.

“Lee Webb,” he says.

The blonde sways sort of out of the way, glancing over her shoulder at Lee. When he takes a step forward, then another, she moves on.

“Dean friggin’ Winchester,” Lee offers, like it’s a goddamn ritual, and Dean’s face cracks into an uncertain smile.

He’s on his feet before he answers though, clutching Lee’s forearm and speaking fast and low: “What the hell are you doing here, man? If there’s a hunt —”

A series of lies present themselves in Lee’s head; he dismisses them. He leans close and feels his hair brushing Dean’s jaw. “Looking for you.”

“Jesus,” Dean breathes, and then, fingers tightening on Lee’s hip, “okay, Jesus — are you all right?”

Lee pulls back a little to study him. Dean looks _freaked,_ or like he can’t tell if he’s freaked or turned on, pupils blown wide, and Lee just barely stops himself from reeling him in and kissing him right there in the bar. He puts his smile in his eyes, all the warmth he’s got in him, and answers, “Yeah, man. Yeah, I’m just fine.”

Dean’s still for a moment. Then he lets out a shuddering breath. “Okay,” he says, and then, “fuck —” and he’s tugging Lee’s arm, pulling him back down the corridor toward the door, then out into the dark and the fog and the haloed lights.

Baby’s parked just around the corner, and Lee bruises his shins falling into her back seat. Dean’s moving desperate and sloppy, like he can’t quite believe Lee is real; pressing palms to his ribs, to his skin, to the back of his neck, tangling hands in his hair. When Lee presses him to the seat he shudders and goes still, all-at-once, in a way that makes Lee pull back to study him before Dean cants his hips and his lips crack out a _“please —”_

It’s just a quick messy double handjob, Lee too far gone and too cramped for anything fancy, digging teeth into Dean’s skin and breathing hot curses against his mouth. After, he pulls back and tries to tell if he’s done wrong — if Dean’s further gone or closer to here — but it’s Dean who narrows his eyes and sits up straight and asks, “So. What, you’re stalking my little brother?”

He looks beautiful, flushed and messy, mouth all puffed up and shining. Lee’s tempted to lean over and nip at the tender skin under his jaw; he doesn’t. “We’re a good forty miles from Palo Alto.”

“And?”

Lee shrugs. “Can’t a man have a thing for surfer chicks?”

A pistol cocks.

When Lee looks down, it’s his own gun in Dean’s hand, muzzle jutting up under his sternum, pointed straight at his heart.

“Hey, now.” He can feel his pulse tripping, steadying — can feel the urgent calm wash over his limbs. “That ain’t friendly.”

“Neither is stalking my brother for two months and lying to me about it.”

Lee raises his hands, careful to keep his palms showing, easing back. He can take Dean if he has to, he thinks; he’ll get a moment’s hesitation on the trigger pull. Probably. “Okay. I said already — I was looking for you.”

“Why?”

He can’t help himself; he glances down at the sticky mess of their bellies, quirks an eyebrow, half-grins.

Dean lets out a little huff of frustration, but at least it’s not the iron in his voice. “You expect me to believe you couldn’t get — this — anywhere you wanted it?”

He’s not quite looking at Lee. Lee waits until he is.

“No,” he says. “Not this.”

“Jesus,” Dean mutters. He closes his eyes, and the tension’s passed. “Get your — get some fucking clothes on.”

Lee figures it’s probably wisest to comply.

\---

Dean doesn’t give him his gun back until a few hours later. He’s gone over it again and again: yes, he came to Stanford looking for Dean. Yes, he made certain rounds that must have tripped alarms for a few of Dean’s contacts; yeah, he’s been hanging around campus, Sam’s dorm, the pool halls. No, he hasn’t seen signs of anything supernatural; no, no hunts in the area, no unusual behavior on Sam’s part, nothing amiss.

“How’s he look?” Dean asks finally, still slumped in his seat. He’s got one hand pinching the place between his eyes.

“Looks good,” Lee tells him honestly. “Got a girlfriend and everything.”

Which wrong-foots him with a megawatt Dean Winchester grin, aimed sideways out from under his hand. “I know, right? _Sammy.”_

And like that, it seems like Lee’s forgiven.

“You could’ve _called,_ you know,” Dean grouses. “Texted. It’s the modern world, we have cell phones.”

Lee stretches, finally easing some stiffness out of his muscles as he replaces the gun in the back of his jeans. “Cancer bricks. I ain’t touching ‘em.”

“Jesus,” says Dean, for about the eleventh time that night, but it sounds fond. “You’re like someone’s grandad.”

Lee winks. “Move a lot quicker, though. ‘Cept when it comes to —”

 _“All_ right.”

They drive for hours that night, down the Pacific Coast Highway and back again, just for the sake of moonlight glittering on the ocean, the way Dean’s Baby leans around the corners. “Ain’t so bad,” Dean says after a while. “California.”

There’s a contemplative silence between them.

Then Lee can’t help it; he snorts a laugh. “Brother, I don’t know where you’ve been getting your information about California —”

Dean flips him off.

It takes a few miles for Lee to get tired of that joke — _yeah, surfing and sun and beach babes, sounds like a real downer_ — and stop laughing at the look on Dean’s face long enough to ask, “So how you been?”

Dean’s smile flickers. “Good,” he says, and it sounds weak. Then: “You know me. I’m always good.”

Lee watches him. “Yeah,” he says softly, “that’s about as big a lie as California.”

Some muscle tightens at Dean’s lower lip; he shrugs.

“Something happen?”

But it’s the wrong question. The line of Dean’s shoulders eases. “Nah, nothing happened. Just in a mood, I guess.”

Lee nods, resigned. “Been missing you.”

Dean chokes.

He pulls off the road at the next walled-off overlook, a promontory jutting out into the invisible sea. It’s started raining again, drops flaring in Baby’s headlight beams, and the sound of the surf is somewhere below them, out of sight. Dean cuts the engine. “You can’t just _say_ shit like that.”

“Why not?” Lee asks. “It’s true.”

“You can’t — come _looking_ for me and tailing my little brother, like — what, is it ‘cause I said you could fuck me? Is that it?”

He’s not looking at Lee; Lee reaches for him. Uses two careful fingers to turn his chin until their eyes meet. “If I recall,” he says, “you _asked_ me to fuck you.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t ask you to come looking for me in —”

“And, no,” says Lee, over him. “It’s not.”

Dean shuts up.

_It’s ‘cause I ain’t had a goddamn person I cared about since I was seventeen years old. It’s ‘cause I ain’t ever had someone look at me like you do._

“I figure,” he says, and his voice cracks. “This world is lonely enough, and there’s plenty of people just make it lonelier. When you find one who doesn’t —”

It’s the right answer. Dean shudders and leans his head back against the seat, closing his eyes. He reaches out blindly and finds Lee’s hand; their fingers tangle, tightening, clutching each other against the leather seat.

It’s fucking dumb: holding hands with another man on a lonely cliff in the middle of the night. Something out of a fucking chick flick.

If either of them wanted to kill the other, it’d be the perfect place and time to do it. Easy disposal. No witnesses.

If that ain’t romantic, Lee doesn’t know what is.

“Let a guy fuck me bareback a couple months back.” Dean’s eyes are still closed. “In Salt Lake City. Wished it was you.”

Lee’s heart speeds. There’s a hell of a lot he’d like to do with _that_ information, but: “He clean?”

Dean shrugs.

“Dean,” says Lee, “was he _clean?”_

“He was rich.” Dean pulls his hand back.

“Yeah, _really_ not the same thing.” Lee runs his fingers through his hair. “At least tell me you got tested.”

The lack of an answer is an answer.

“Okay,” says Lee. “Okay — we’re going to head back to my motel room. Then, tomorrow — we’re going to a clinic. All right?”

For a moment Dean looks like he’d like to protest.

Instead he starts the engine, and they drive back through the rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Devil Makes Three, "[For Good Again](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfishfsLiAM)."


	6. Ain't No Stranger Here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy birthday to Natalie!
> 
> [foolondahill17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolondahill17/pseuds/foolondahill17) made a [title collage](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23173768) for this fic and it's so fucking cool. Go check it out, y'all.

The closer they get to the clinic, the more Dean fidgets, the whiter his knuckles grip the wheel.

Lee notices, but he’s not sure there’s much his acknowledgement can do about it, so he keeps his mouth shut.

He waits in the car. Dean’s in there for half an hour maybe, not long, and when he gets out he’s moving fast, fists deep in his pockets and the collar of his leather jacket high around his neck. He starts the car without speaking, fumbling twice with the keys, then drives about two miles before swerving abruptly to the side of the road, leaning out of his seat, and puking.

Lee doesn’t comment. Offers his flask, ‘cause that’s what he’s got, to wash out the taste.

Dean sips gratefully, then again, then drops his hand with an abrupt release of breath. “Fucking hate those places,” he says. “Used to — always scared they’d take Sammy away from me.”

He hands the flask back, and Lee caps it. “That ever happen?”

Dean closes his eyes. “Once,” he says, and opens them again. “They said they’d call me. Couple hours for results.”

“Well, all right,” says Lee, drawls it enough to see Dean flash a look over him, then drop his chin as if that could hide the smile stealing over his mouth, the red that colors his cheeks.

\---

They wind up doing some honest-to-god work. Sitting in a diner comparing notes: a werewolf den in Natchez, a funky haunting in Bismarck. Lee’s never kept a hunter’s journal, but Dean does, a yellow notepad he scribbles details into, stray ideas in swift blocky capitals with question marks that fly almost off the page.

Lee doesn’t honestly have a lot to contribute — hasn’t done all that many hunts of late — but the work seems to calm Dean. Enough that when his cell phone rings he startles a little, shoulders hunching, and glances across the table at Lee before answering.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says into the phone, and then, “no,” and then, after a pause, “thank you,” and he hangs up.

Lee spreads his hands.  _ Well? _

Dean’s flushed again, spots of color high on his cheeks. He leans back, slinging an arm over the seat, and a muscle in his cheek tugs at his mouth.

“Yeah,” he says, raising his chin like it’s a challenge. “I’m good to go.”

\---

They stop at a liquor store to fill Baby’s cooler up with beer. Lee’s gotten to know the area pretty well, these last couple months, and a couple blocks from the motel he says, “Hold up — turn right here.”

That earns him a swift glance, but Dean obeys.

The road takes them to the outskirts of town and then up, turning to gravel. There’s a padlock on the gate, but Lee slides out of his seat and picks it, easy as you please. He holds the gate while Dean drives through and replaces it, dummy-locking it behind him.

They’re in a pasture. Some cows turn curious glances at them as they drive, and Dean snorts. “Leave it to you to find the one place in California that looks like Oklahoma.”

Lee nudges him with an elbow. “Shut up. You’ll see.”

The road leads them on a wide curve and then stops, abruptly, on a grassy ridgetop — and the wind is rushing, Pacific glittering wide and impossible out before them, sun sinking low and turning its silvers to gold.

Dean swears softly and shifts the Impala into park.

“Found this place a month or so ago,” Lee tells him. He unlatches his door, and Dean follows him when he hefts the cooler from the backseat, carries it around to the Impala’s hood. The wind almost snatches his words away. “Owner doesn’t live around here — only visits in summer. Hires a local guy to check on the critters.”

He fumbles in his pocket — there’s a bottle opener on his keychain — and Dean smirks and cracks his cap with his ring.

Lee raises his eyebrows. “Well, if you’re gonna show off,” he says, and lets Dean open his beer too.

They clink bottles and lean side by side against Baby’s hood. Lee always loves it up here — the way the sun and wind smart in your eyes, rush around your ears, pluck at your clothes and your voice. Sometimes he imagines the wind is bleaching him clean, inside and out, just like the dead grass at his feet.

It feels peaceful. He wonders if Dean feels the same.

“Always kinda hated the idea of California,” says Dean. He’s got a philosophical squint on. “Like — I dunno.”

“A whole fuckin’ state for people who know they’re better than you,” Lee supplies, and Dean gives him a half-shrug nod.

“I mean it’s bullshit,” he adds after a moment. “There’s every kind of people, everywhere.”

“Yeah.”

They drink in silence for a few minutes. Then Lee says, “Scared the shit out of some Stanford dickbag, when I first got here. Poor kid tried to give me money — thought I was homeless.”

There’s a pause, and then Dean’s snorting — doubling over to cough at half-inhaled beer. “Up my  _ nose, _ Jesus,” he’s saying, and then, “Dude, you  _ are _ homeless.”

Lee grins and stretches. “Yeah, well.”

He watches Dean recover, wipe streaming eyes and quell the last of his laughter. He gets it; it’s fucking funny. “I mean, you ever do it? Cardboard sign and a coffee cup, that shit?”

Dean hesitates, then shakes his head. “Nah.”

“Why not? We’re all fucking homeless. Bet you woulda made good money back in the day — cute kid. Legal money, even.”

Dean looks away. He half-shrugs in answer and takes another pull from his beer.

And yeah, Lee gets it.  _ You know why. _

“How long you been doing that shit,” he asks, “anyway?”

It takes a moment for Dean to lower his beer. When he does, he doesn’t shift his gaze from the horizon; it’s started to paint itself colors, gold fading to green to blue in the cloudless sky.

He could play like he doesn’t know what Lee’s talking about. Instead, he says, “I told you. I don’t anymore.”

Lee counts on his fingers. “Thousand-dollar ass. Bareback Mormon — or you tryin’ to tell me that was for free?”

“Dude, I never said he —”

“What, so it was?”

Dean scowls at him. After a moment, he answers reluctantly, “You know it fucking wasn’t.”

“So —”

“Look, I’ve made some exceptions, all right? Like to see  _ you _ turn down that kind of cash.”

He’s scowling, face red from more than just the wind, grip tight on the neck of his beer bottle. It’s empty. Lee reaches to grab him a fresh one. “I ain’t judging, kid. Just asking.”

“Not a kid,” Dean answers automatically, but some of the defensiveness goes out of his shoulders as he cracks his second beer.

“Yeah,” says Lee, “I’m getting that.” And then, when Dean glances back over at him, “When’d you start?”

Dean’s face goes just a little bit blank.

There’s bits of Lee’s own past that he can’t really remember — not if he looks them head-on. They’ll sneak up around him in quiet moments or in dreams, but when he tries to piece them together, find the words that match them, they skitter away.

He doesn’t really know what his face looks like, when he’s trying to raise his dead, but he thinks it might be a little like Dean’s just now.

Finally Dean gives a little half-shoulder shrug. “Dunno. Sammy needed soccer shit. I like sex, man; not like it was a chore.”

“Dangerous work, though. Especially for a kid.” Lee keeps his eyes on Dean. “Plenty of creeps out there who want more than a BJ.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Ten times outta ten? ‘Cause I remember getting the best of you, not that long ago —”

But Dean grins. “I had you right where I wanted you.”

Lee has to laugh at the bald-faced lie. “Oh, yeah? Pinning you to the floor?”

“Maybe.”

Lee stretches. A sense of well-being curls around his spine. “Guess you’ve filled out a little since then. Might be a bit of a challenge these days. If you want a shot at the title —”

Dean tilts his head. He sets down his beer, careful, in the grass by the Impala’s left headlight. He studies Lee for a moment, then rolls up his sleeves: one crisp turn of each cuff, two.

He’s smiling when he says, “Don’t mind if I do.”

\---

It’s a damn good motherfucking fight.

They’re showing off, both of them. None of the usual bar brawl moves — Dean’s quiet, focused, eyes tracking the muscles of Lee’s abdomen for a sudden flash of intent. They circle each other; jab a few quick feints; Lee throws a roundhouse and Dean ducks it, backs off laughing.

Lee’s grinning too. “Gonna dance all day, boy?”

Dean answers by rushing him.

It’s a flurry of blows and blocks, high, low, back again. For a moment, they’re almost grappling; then Dean twists away again, light on his feet. Smart. He knows Lee’s body by now, the muscle in him and how they fit together. It’s Lee’s advantage if they go to the ground.

Lee smiles wolfishly and goes about making it happen.

They fight in silence, except for the howl of the wind and the occasional gust of laughter. Dean circles so the sun flares in Lee’s eyes; his face is beautiful like this, lined with gold. Lee can imagine what they’d look like, the two of them, to a distant watcher — two shadows dancing, the Impala beside them, against the painted sky.

When they hit the dirt, it’s Dean’s move, not Lee’s.

A leg hooked around the back of his knee, a jerk of the hips, and Lee’s flying — rolling. Then Dean’s on top of him, pinning him down, eyes so bright and alive with happiness that it punches the breath right out of Lee’s lungs — goddamn. God  _ damn, _ but he’d slay giants for this one, ride to the ends of the earth, hurl himself laughing at any comers, any gods, the sky or the deep blue sea.

He arches up to kiss Dean on the mouth. Then uses the instant of surprise to flip him, quick and powerful, rolling in the dry grass.

Dean’s under him. The lengths of their bodies pressed together — Dean’s eyes hooded, face glazed with want. A breath hitches into his throat and stops there, and his lips part.

Lee can’t fucking look away.

Dean’s hips arch up beneath him, and Lee groans. They’re both rock hard, grinding, the bite of zippers almost painful between them, and Lee ducks his head to find something his teeth can hold onto — Dean’s earlobe, the skin of his neck, the collar of his shirt —

And Dean’s twisting, writhing from under him. A knee in his back and his breath  _ oofs _ out of his lungs; he gets a faceful of dust. Dean’s laughing again as he springs to his feet, face pink and triumphant, dancing back and out of reach.

It takes Lee a moment longer to follow. He comes to his feet slowly, still recovering his breath, rubbing dirt from his face, and he sees Dean go still — an instant of concern.

And Lee’s on him. Grappling both his wrists and driving him backward, punching another surprised laugh out of Dean’s chest. They both slam hard against Baby’s hood, and they’re chest to chest again, close enough for Lee to catch Dean’s mouth in a bruising kiss.

When he pulls back, they’re both breathing hard. Dean’s hands still trapped in his grip. “You got stuff —?” Lee asks, and his voice comes out half-gravel.

Dean’s nodding, more than he needs to. “Jeans pocket.” His wrists flex against Lee’s hold, and Lee rumbles a warning and tightens his hold. Then he crosses Dean’s wrists so he can clamp them together with one hand and uses the other to fumble between them.

The fly of Dean’s jeans is damp and straining. Lee swipes a rough thumb across it to feel Dean’s spine buckle, then pops the button, drags the zipper down. The slack gives him easy access to Dean’s pocket; he reaches inside to find the foil packet, the little bottle. Dean’s breath is wild, erratic; Lee dips his head and breathes, “Good boy,” into his ear.

That makes Dean start writhing again, struggling to get free, but his eyes are bright and laughing. “Gonna spin you around and fuck you over the hood of this car,” Lee tells him. “That cool by you?”

“God,” says Dean, and “fuck,” and “ _ please, _ ” and he’s already twisting as Lee yanks his jeans down over his ass. Already digging his hips back against him as Lee struggles with his own belt; already whining with need as Lee preps him, quick and rougher than he’d like to, but Dean’s breathing hard and working insistently back into him, almost snarling, “get the fuck —”

But he goes still when Lee finally lines up and drives inside him. Still and clenched and perfect, hotter than anything in the world, and Lee holds onto his hips for a moment and tries not to fucking pass out from how good it feels,  _ Dean, _ all around him.

Dean’s breath shudders in, then out. And then it’s like something’s been knocked loose inside him — something loose and light and giddy, delirious, and he’s laughing again. Laughing and laughing, with the joy of it, laughing and hitching and digging into Lee’s thrusts, laughing with his cheek to the Impala’s warm metal and Lee’s hand clenched at the back of his neck, laughing and laughing like the world’s a game they’ve learned to beat, like they’ve crossed a line and they’ll never have to go back.

He doesn’t stop laughing until Lee’s shuddering and spilling inside him, until Lee’s fumbling hands find Dean’s dick and jack it roughly, still rolling out the last of his orgasm inside him, draped desperate and sweaty across Dean’s back, breathing hot curses in his ear.

Dean’s come splatters across his own jeans and his Baby’s tire. He shudders to stillness, a stillness Lee wants to gather up in his arms, only then Dean’s swearing and struggling free. “Mess of my  _ girl, _ ” he mutters, irritated, and then shuts up when Lee kisses him, and kisses him again, and kisses him again, as the sky fades to stars and the wind goes to bed with the sea.

\---

“Technically,” Dean comments later, “you didn’t  _ win.” _

Lee takes a meditative sip of his beer. “You don’t get the title on a technicality.”

“Yeah,” says Dean. “Guess you don’t. Next time.”

_ Next time. _ Lee likes the sound of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from The Devil Makes Three, [Native Son](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vF8hFzCBCw).


	7. In Some Motel Room

Dean gives him his phone number before they part ways. His cell and his backup cell and his backup backup cell, which Lee ribs him duly about, but he folds up the slip of paper and tucks it in the back of his wallet, where it won’t fall out when he goes for his cash.

“What exactly are you running to?” Lee asks him at one point, lying on the motel bed, his arms folded behind his head as he watches Dean get dressed. “Your old man? Might do him some good, someone telling him no once in a while.”

That earns him a sidelong look, the slightly fond, slightly incredulous one Dean reserves for when Lee’s acting like an idiot. “I think Sammy’s dealt him enough of that for one decade.”

“So?” Lee rolls over. He feels Dean’s eyes track to his ass and grins. “Live a little, man. There’ll always be another hunt.”

Dean’s still for a moment. Lee can’t see his expression, and then he’s moving across the room to his duffel bag, rifling for a clean shirt. Lee twists around to watch. The line of Dean’s mouth has gone flat.

“It’s that easy for you?” Dean asks finally, straightening up, a black tee balled in both his hands. His voice is perfectly neutral. “Letting people die?”

“Whoa, whoa.” Lee sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Who said anything about letting people die? I find a creep — I gank it. But there’s a hundred more out there at the same time doing the same fucked-up shit. You want me to feel guilty ‘bout all of those, too?”

Dean wavers. He runs a hand through his hair; scratches at the back of his skull. There are moments when it hits Lee what a _kid_ he still is, barely at home in the lines of his own muscle; this is one. “I — can’t do it like that,” he says, finally. “It’s why we got into the job, right? Saving people.”

Lee’s — not honestly sure that’s why he got into the job. He’s not sure it isn’t because he didn’t have a damn thing else to do. Because hurting things feels good when they’re evil.

It sounds nice, though. What Dean’s saying; being a big damn hero. It just also sounds — like the kind of thing that’ll kill you.

“Yeah,” he says finally, cracking a smile, and it seems like that’s good enough. Dean takes it, anyway. Turns away and pulls on his shirt.

He doesn’t ask if Lee wants to come with him, though. And Lee doesn’t ask where he’s going.

\---

Then there are the months on the road. Lee calling Dean sometimes, odd hours, on a payphone or a burner cell; “Hey, sweetheart,” he’ll say, “what are you wearing?”

That usually earns him a laugh or a “Fuck off, Webb”; once, he hears a rustle of cloth covering the speaker, then Dean’s voice, muffled: _It’s Lee. Lee Webb. Yeah, we traded numbers after Cheyenne —_

“You nearby?” Dean asks a moment later, unmuffled again. “We’re in Idaho.”

Lee’s not nearby. He’s in Memphis. “Nah,” he says, “but I’ll have this phone for a couple days, if you wanna call back,” and Dean does.

By then Lee’s in South Dakota. Doesn’t matter; Dean’s in Yuma, all excited about ghost cowboys. His dad’s sent him off on his own. “Gonna celebrate your freedom tonight?” Lee asks, voice a little raspy at the thought. “Chase some tail?”

He can feel Dean’s easy _nah, I’m beat, man,_ about to slide down the line between them; then his instant of hesitation. “Why,” he asks instead, and Lee can _hear_ the tide tugging at his voice, current taking hold; “you thinkin’ about it? Me with some girl?”

“Shit, yeah,” Lee breathes, pressing the ridge of his palm against the front of his jeans. “Find you one who does that thing with her tongue — you know the thing.” Dean make a choked noise, and he grins. “God. Can just picture you how she’s gonna see you. Someone should if it can’t be me. Your face when you’re all blown to smithereens.”

Dean’s breathing is shallow.

“Text me what color her hair is,” Lee adds, “so I can picture —”

He’s cut off by a groan from Dean, then, “Jesus, Webb, all right — all right.”

 _Brunette,_ says the message on Lee’s phone a half hour later.

He pumps his fist at an empty room.

It takes a couple hours after that before Dean calls him back. “That long, huh?” asks Lee, pulling off to the side of the road, phone jammed between his shoulder and his ear. “Should I be insecure?”

He’s pretty sure Dean flips him off, somewhere unseen, but his voice is laughing when he answers, “Some of us are gentlemen, y’know.”

“Oh, I know,” says Lee, darkly. He can’t help himself; he’s been half hard all night, lying watching reruns on some scratchy motel bedspread; he needs this. He’s unbuttoning his jeans. “But I hope she took that gentleman shine right off you. Hope she got you down and dirty and begging for it —”

“Jesus Christ,” says Dean. “I’m telling you, okay?”

And that starts a new thing between them: the phone sex. Or, not exactly phone sex — usually they each go out for their separate conquests, report back later — but something like it, anyway. Sometimes it feels a little dirty, dirty as in shitty; using some chick as a stand-in for a thing she can’t even see. Except for that one time, when Lee gets Dean on the line loose and laughing, and immediately hears a voice somewhere in the background — _Who’s that? You got a friend?_

“Sounds like I’m interrupting something,” Lee says, and he hears the start of Dean’s protest before a woman’s voice in his ear: “You sound hot. You wanna join us?”

“Depends,” Lee tells her. “You within an hour’s drive of Lubbock?”

There’s a beat of consideration, then — “No.” She sounds disappointed. Then, brightly, “But you could stay on the line!”

And that’s how he winds up leaning against a payphone in hundred-degree-heat, plastic casing digging into his forehead, talking a woman through fucking his best friend: _Twist his nipple. Harder. He likes that,_ and, _Tell me all about his cock now. Pretty, ain’t it?_

 _Tell him he’s mine,_ he breathes later, though he knows he’s on speaker, Dean can hear him just fine. _Tell him you’re just keeping him warm for me._

He’s not all the way sure Dean will ever speak to him again, after that, but he does; it’s a couple days later, in Roswell, New Mexico, when there’s a banging on his motel room door. He opens it with his pistol cocked and there’s Dean, red-faced, arms defensive across his chest. “You goddamn bastard,” he says, “you ain’t _that_ hard to find,” and Lee’s not sure he isn’t gonna get decked before Dean surges to kiss him.

They fuck twice that night, once on the bed, once against the wall; after, Lee’s muscles are shaky and singing. Dean lights up a joint — that’s new; Lee’s seen him with the occasional cigarette, but never weed — and they pass it back and forth. “Someday,” says Dean, “I’m gonna fucking kill you. I swear, the shit you pull.”

Lee grins. “Worth it,” he says.

The next night they go out drinking, and that’s the one with the twins — no, the triplets. And after that, Lee declares, “I’m taking you to a proper city — one with a gay bar — not a roadhouse back alley, a real gay bar. Where you don’t get paid.”

He half-thinks Dean’s gonna protest. There’s a slow flick of the eyes that suggests it. But he doesn’t. He even lets Lee drive the Impala; lip-syncs to “Eye of the Tiger” when he thinks Lee’s looking away.

They make it to Albuquerque, but they don’t wind up leaving the motel room. They lie in bed watching Oprah reruns and getting high off their asses, laughing ‘til Lee thinks he’s gonna split a side. The AC unit’s janky, so they lounge naked on top of the sheets, pooling sweat on each other wherever they touch. Arms thrown over bellies. Lee’s hair clinging to Dean’s cheek.

“Worked a case once in this city,” Dean tells him, somewhere around 3am. “Buncha truck stop murders — kids no one’s gonna miss.”

“You get the fucker?”

“Wasn’t a monster.” Dean takes a drag, then drops his arm again. “Gave it to the PD.” He narrowly misses burning the sheets.

Lee waits a moment. “They get the fucker?”

Dean doesn’t answer. The commercial break ends. Lee’s too high to figure out how to follow it through.

A while later — how much, Lee doesn’t know — Dean turns on his side to face him and asks, “You ever kill a human?”

His eyes are green and a little out of focus. But Lee feels like they’re burning right through him — like actually burning, drilling through bone and turning gray matter to vapor. He’s fucking _blitzed._ He still knows better than to answer that question. “Have you?”

“Thought about it. What it’d be like. Thought about it then.”

Lee swears; he struggles to sit up. “Okay. Fuck Albuquerque. Shit town. We’re going — we’re going to Denver. Right now. You an’ —”

He trips on his own jeans. Dean dissolves into helpless laughter. Lee glares up at him from the floor.

“Tomorrow,” he amends. “You wait an’ see.”

\---

They don’t go to Denver either.

They don’t go anywhere — just take Dean’s car and hit the open road. Lee thinks he sees Dean’s shoulders tighten when they hit the Kansas state line, but they don’t stop. Just keep tracking an aimless diagonal across the plains, grass fires and speed traps as far as the eye can see.

“When I got out of the psych ward,” Lee says after a while. They’ve got takeout from a fried chicken place; his hand’s slowly going numb around his giant cup of sweet tea. “Someone died. A nurse. It wasn’t on purpose. She hit her head — fell down the stairs.”

Dean glances over at him once, then again. “I’m sorry, man,” he says.

Lee doesn’t want Dean to feel sorry for him. He wants Dean to see all of him that’s hot and aching and evil, the pieces of who he is that always crawl deep in his gut. Away from the light. He wants the light on them; he wants Dean to want him anyway. Maybe they wouldn’t matter so much anymore.

 _She wasn’t on purpose,_ he wants to say, _but the rest of them were. It was me or them. That’s what it always comes down to in this life: you or them. The natural law. Dunno how you’ve gotten this far in the saving-people business without learning that one._

Instead, he hums aimlessly, tunes the radio.

It’s hours later — they’ve broken out a couple of road beers, which Lee knows means Dean’s feeling anchorless; Lee’s smoking, and Dean’s not, but it’s not that big a car — when Dean starts humming along with the song fuzzing in and out on their current station. It’s Bob Seger, Lee thinks. Damn him, but Dean’s taught him a thing or two about rock and roll. The second verse comes in, and Dean doesn’t stop, so Lee elbows him. “Sing it. Go on.”

And maybe they’re just the right mix of buzzed and loose and happy, melancholy and free; maybe the world outside’s just the right kind of shuttered — but Dean does. It takes him a second, squinting for the words, but then he opens his mouth and what comes out isn’t half-assed bullshit. “ _Here I am — on the road again, there I am up on the stage —”_

He puts some grit into it and Lee _whoops._ Dean’s grinning, singing, _“There I go, playing star again. There I go, turn the page.”_

“Don’t you dare fucking stop.” Lee grabs Dean around the neck. “I know you know the words.”

And for a wonder, Dean doesn’t. He sings the damn song right through to the end, and Lee knew it, he _knew_ it, this kid could’ve been a rock star if he’d tried. Could’ve done any damn thing in the world. Hell, he still could. There ain’t no doors closed, not for Dean Winchester.

“Hang on,” he says, “hang on,” because he knows there’s a Bob Seger tape in Dean’s collection somewhere. A moment later he’s got it; he hits fast forward and times it just right. “Again. Let’s go.”

He’s got the song better himself now — it’s not a complicated one; not hard to coax Dean out of his shell. Lee feels his way into a harmony, hums on the verses, lets it rip on the chorus, and before long Dean’s right there with him, and Lee’s pounding the dashboard with a fist. “Fuck — fuck yes! Knew you could sing. We are — damnit, we are finding a bar with karaoke _right now,_ and we are closing the place down. You hear me?”

They get off the highway at the next exit. It’s a tiny, three-bar town, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s Wednesday, and there ain’t nothing like Wednesday in a small town to bring out the karaoke nights. That doesn’t mean they’re busy — there’s half a dozen old drunks at the bar when they walk in, two occupied tables, some guys playing pool in back — but that’s just less competition for the stage. “My boy here,” says Lee into the mic, “my boy’s got something special for you tonight — Dean Winchester, Rock Star. Worldwide debut.”

Dean rolls his eyes. He drags his heels. But he gets up there on that stage and he sings those half-dozen drunks to the floor.

They do Seger. They do Haggard. Bon Jovi, Willie Nelson, Allman Brothers, the Band. They sing and keep on singing as the place slowly empties out, as the bartender waves them on. “One more while I close up!” she calls at the end of “Whipping Post,” and Lee catches Dean’s eye over the dying chords. “Good Ol’ Boys,” he mouths, and Dean groans, “Oh no,” but Lee counters, “Oh _yes,”_ and Dean doesn’t say no again.

The bartender sways her hips to the beat as she wipes down the tables. Claps her hands over her head once, twice, three times, dancing a few steps, then starts to stack the chairs.

“ _Straightenin’ the curves,”_ Dean sings with his eyes closed, mouth just an inch from the mic. _“Flattenin’ the hills.”_ He’s fucking beautiful in the cheap blue stage lighting, cheekbone lined in gold. _“Some day the mountain might get ‘em, but the law never will.”_

For a brief moment, one blazing night in the middle-of-nowhere Nebraska, Lee even believes it’s true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from [Car Wreck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuyPGwM7694) by The Devil Makes Three.


	8. Castles Made of Sand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've added canon-typical violence to the tags. This chapter deals with the "cult thing in Arizona" and some PTSD flashbacks, so warnings for that.

That’s the last good time. Or maybe the last good time was a long time before. It’s always sort of hard to figure, when Lee looks back.

It’s a week or two later he finds himself in Illinois. He putters down the street past the old brownstones without meaning to stop, even though he knows the address by heart. But there’s an empty parking space, and the night is warm and sighing on a breeze, and he’s not ready to be anywhere else yet. He props himself against his hood under a sycamore tree, half-hidden in the shadows. Cracks a beer.

His brother doesn’t get home until after ten. Doctors-in-training; nearly as bad as hunters that way.

He doesn’t see Lee at first, but then he freezes when he’s on the first step, hand light on the wrought iron rail. He turns. “Leo?”

Lee sidles a little, so a stripe of light hits his face. “Goin’ by Lee now. Actually.”

His brother huffs a little breath of almost-laughter. Lee can see his left hand flexing around his keys. Like he’s thinking about how they’d do as a weapon — they wouldn’t. Like he’s thinking about how quick he could get to the door.

“Yeah?” he says. “Lee what?”

Now it’s Lee’s turn to laugh, a full-belly one; fuckin’ brass balls on the kid. “You know I ain’t telling you that.”

His brother’s lips thin. Smile, grimace — it’s hard to tell.

“You know I’ll have to call the cops on you,” he says, “right?”

Lee shrugs. “I’ll be gone before they get here.” He kicks the car’s bumper. “Ditch her plates.”

“You’re wanted for murder.”

It still stings, even though he should be used to it by now. The one person he’s ever killed by accident is the one they want him for. “What,” he asks, “and you’re scared I’m comin’ for you?”

And suddenly his brother’s moving away from the stairs, taking quick steps toward him. “Leo —”

It’s instinct that has Lee’s beer bottle rolling on the sidewalk. His gun out of the back of his jeans. Not quite leveled at his brother, not his chest anyway, but —

His brother stops.

Lee’s shaking. That’s the one thing he can’t have. He can’t be close enough to touch.

“Things are better than they were,” his brother says, carefully. “Mental health hospitals. There are new antipsychotics. They might help. You wouldn’t go to prison. You wouldn’t even be tried as an adult.”

Lee doesn’t move.

His brother holds up his phone. “I’m dialing 911 now. You could stay. You could —” his voice wavers — “try and be my family again.”

Lee could stop him. Wouldn’t even have to hurt him. He could take the phone right out of his hand.

He doesn’t. He sticks his gun back in his jeans. Slides into his car. By the time the phone’s against his brother’s ear, he’s shifting into drive. Rolling, easy as you please, down the block and around the corner, out of sight.

\---

He ditches that car and another one and crosses half the country before he lets himself call Dean.

“Want you,” he growls into the payphone, no games or premises. There’s an ache between his eyes, behind his gut, and he needs to let it out. He needs somewhere to put it. He keeps dreaming of Dean, long limbs, bared neck; keeps picturing the marks he could leave on his skin.

“Uh,” says Dean, a little light, a little wrong-footed. “I’m with my Dad — working a werewolf thing in Pennsylvania. If you wanted to join us —”

“I don’t want to join you.” Lee grits his teeth. “I want to _fuck_ you. Wanna tie you to a fucking bed and — and never let you leave.”

There’s a beat of silence. “Yeah, well,” says Dean, and his voice is clipped, “Pennsylvania’s what I got.”

Lee goes to Pennsylvania.

He’s stupid on that hunt — reckless. There are more werewolves than they expected, and Lee kills more than his share, up close and personal; swinging blades and chopping heads. After, he wipes blood off his mouth with the back of his hand and feels Dean watching him.

They fuck in a gas station bathroom. Door locked, John somewhere outside — they’re supposed to be cleaning up the blood. Dean smears it in handprints over the sink.

After, when he’s pulling his jeans back up over his ass, fastening his buckle, there’s something tight in his face. “Feels like the good old days.”

Lee takes him by the jaw and kisses him softly, hungrily, til Dean’s knees sag. When they break apart he asks, “That feel like the good old days?”

Dean’s cheeks are pink. His shoulders hunch for a moment, then release, the tension gone out of him. “Nah, man, I’m sorry. Just in a bitch of a mood, I guess.”

But things are never quite the same after that.

If Lee’s feeling darker, wilder, he’s not the only one. John’s taken a turn for the obsessive — more obsessive than before, even — and he’s drinking all the time. Flask in his pocket while he drives. While he hunts. Talking about his dead wife in bars. Lee can see it wearing on Dean sometimes, watch him cracking and smoothing under the grinding wheel of his father’s grief. He hauls John off to bed some nights, physically carries him when he’s too far gone to walk on his own. One time, he comes back from that with a split lip and a rapidly darkening eye.

Lee reaches out to touch it. For once, lately, the gentleness in him isn’t hard to find.

But Dean’s shoulders tense. He looks away. “Want to spar?”

Lee doesn’t, not really, but he can’t deny Dean a goddamn thing.

They fight in parking lots, that summer. In weedy backyards, kicking away discarded needles and broken glass. They fuck when Dean’s dad’s asleep, passed out from whiskey, and half the time Dean wants someone to hurt him and Lee wants something to hurt; they fight again after to cover the marks.

The Arizona case comes around the beginning of September.

It’s a cult thing. That’s how the story comes to them: bunch of families moving out to the middle of a desert. Whispers about dark rituals — human sacrifice. John thinks they might be dealing with a god.

“I’m gonna need you boys to go in undercover,” he says. “Get close to it, learn everything you can about this thing. Okay? If you can get a name, I can get on my network, dig into the lore — see if we can figure out how to kill the damn thing. Gods ain’t easy, but there’s always a way.”

Lee goes back to his motel room and starts packing his bag.

Dean’s brow furrows when he walks in. “What are you doing?”

Lee spares him half a glance. “Not walking into a damn cult, is what I’m doing.” He sniffs a shirt and shoves it vaguely into the dirty side of his duffel. “Figure if we just head north, your dad’ll never miss us — not until we’re a thousand miles away, at any rate. Let ‘im work out how to solve this thing without putting his own damn kid in the belly of the beast.”

Dean’s looking at him like he’s crazy. “We’re not leaving.”

“Yeah, and what?” Lee snaps. “You’re really gonna do this? You need that bad to prove yourself to him?”

He’s shaking, again; he knows it. He doesn’t care. But Dean sees it, and his eyes widen, and he says with something halfway between softness and scorn: “You’re fucking scared.”

“He uses you as a goddamn honeypot,” Lee fires back. “You never noticed? Sticks your ass out there on the line, pretty as you please — hell, for all I know he _wanted_ you out there whoring for him —”

And Dean’s crossing the room, slamming him against the wall, arm a bar across his throat. “Shut your goddamn mouth.”

They’re both breathing heavy. Nose to nose. There’s no haze in Dean’s eyes this time as they burn through Lee’s, burn his nerves to cinders and his tongue to ash. He shuts his goddamn mouth.

Dean kisses him, roughly. It’s bold — the motel room door’s ajar, John could walk by, anyone could walk by. Then he pulls back and says, “Do whatever the hell you want. I’m going in.”

So of course Lee fucking follows him.

\---

In the end, it turns out not to be a god at all. Just a ghost with a talent for playing a part.

Doesn’t make much of a difference, when it’s got a bunch of zealous moms and druggies and wayward teens all hanging off its every word. They think it hung the moon — literally. It comes out of its cave with the wind all whipping around it, face dark with markings that might be paint, and promises them the world. A new order for its followers — those who prove their devotion.

It’s also wearing overalls. Lee doesn’t notice that, in the half-light and swirling dust, but Dean does.

The latest sacrifice is already done by the time they get there. Kid’s skull crunched under a rock. The blood is sticky, drawing flies, and for a moment Lee’s not in Arizona at all; he’s thirteen years ago, crouching in dark woods, and that blood’s on his hands. All over his hands.

He blinks when Dean elbows him, hisses in his ear: “So what, it doesn’t eat them? Hearts, blood, nothing?”

Lee sways. Blinks again. “Guess not.”

“That sound like any god you’ve ever heard of?”

He doesn’t fucking know.

There’s a few dozen people in the camp, all told. No real pattern: families, a couple businessmen in nice clothes, drifters. There’s some jockeying for position among the rock overhangs, which offer protection from the sun and the wind, but there’s one big communal campfire in the middle of the canyon. And there’s the cave where the god hangs out.

They learn what they can from the other devotees. A skinny guy with a scraggly beard seems eager enough to make their acquaintance, and he barely needs pumping for information. He introduces himself as Julius. “That’s Abraham,” he says, pointing out toward the edges of the firelight, at a man who’s sitting alone, eyes vacant. “Not his real name. Wanted to do one better than the one in the Bible. That’s his kid back there.”

“The god told him to do that?” Dean asks.

Julius shrugs. “He felt called.”

The ghost laughs about that later. They’ve got his name: Amos Smithers. They’ve got him behind a salt line, trapped in his lair. It doesn’t matter. His bones aren’t here. “You think _I’m_ going to kill you?” he sneers. “I don’t need to. I don’t even need to tell _them_ to. They’ll get to it all on their own. Tonight, I’d guess; they’re restless already.”

Lee’s falling down a long black well. A thing with teeth is smiling at him; he’s shoving a body in its path. There’s blood on his hands.

“Yeah, sure,” says Dean, all casual, and there’s a hand gripping Lee’s arm, just above the elbow — he nearly throws it off, nearly strikes out — then he realizes it’s Dean’s.

“Come on.” A low mutter in his ear. “Let’s get out of here.”

It’s still light out, but the sun’s sinking, casting the canyon in shadow. Dean opts for the vertical exit, and shouts follow them up the canyon walls. They scramble over stepwise cliffs, and when Lee nearly slips, Dean grips his hand. They climb, they strain, they belly-flop their way across scree slopes; people are still yelling below, hurling things. A rock barely misses Lee’s head —

— and then they’re up on the mesa and running, Lee’s fingers nerveless in Dean’s grasp. Dean’s got his phone out in the other hand, muttering _“come on, come on,_ ” as he watches its screen, and when he skids to a stop it’s so abrupt Lee nearly trips and eats dust.

They’ve found cell service, he puts together. Dean’s already got his phone to his ear. “Dad? It’s a ghost, not a god. Amos Smithers. Yeah, 1800s. Couldn’t tell you where he’s buried, but it’s gotta be somewhere close. Listen — we need to get back, those people are gonna kill some other poor asshole to appease him — yeah, thanks.”

He snaps his phone closed. Lee staggers; stares. “You want to go _back?”_

Dean barely glances at him. “That salt circle won’t hold for long. And they’ll kill each other even if it does.”

“No,” says Lee. “No fucking way.”

“You not hearing me, Webb? Someone’s gonna die.”

“Yeah, and it’ll be us if we go back there!”

“I can talk. Stall ‘em.”

Lee feels the air rushing into his lungs, great heaving gasps of it. _No, you can’t,_ he wants to say. _You can’t — you don’t know. There’s a fear, there’s a what-if-I’m-next kind of fear, and it makes people do crazy things. You don’t_ know.

“Hey.” Dean’s palm is on his face, brow furrowed. “You okay? Listen to me. It’s just people. We can take ‘em. Hey — is there something else goin’ on here I should know about?”

Lee could tell him.

 _The thing that took me,_ he could say. _When I was a know-nothing kid. I wasn’t the only one. There were six of us, penned out in the woods, and we never knew when it was gonna be back, and — there was a knife._

His throat is made of glue. He shakes his head.

“All right, well.” Dean takes a slow step back. “I’m going — come with me, don’t. Your call.”

He walks several steps backward. A hesitation in each one. Lee stays frozen where he is.

Dean turns, slowly; he starts walking faster. He takes one look over his shoulder, and then he doesn’t anymore.

Time isn’t passing. It can’t be. Lee’s limbs aren’t moving, his lungs aren’t breathing. But Dean keeps getting smaller. Silhouetted against the sky.

Lee’s hands are bloody, bloody, bloody. The lady cop is talking in steely tones. _Some kind of fucking psychopath,_ she’s saying. _Kidnapping kids,_ she’s saying. _The only one to make it out alive._

He can’t go back there.

_The only one to make it out alive —_

He can’t do that either. Not again.

 _Some kind of fucking psychopath,_ and the knife’s in Lee’s hands, but this time it’s Dean who’s gasping bloody at its other end.

He shakes his head. There is no blood — just the rust-stained mesa. The setting sun. The point of darkness that is Dean, dwindling against it; the arrow of shadow trailing behind him.

Lee follows where it leads.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second-to-last chapter! The last one is done too, I think — I just need to give it a second look and some edits. I told you I'd finish this during, uh, hiatus.
> 
> This chapter's title is from "[Castles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZxwsMRN0aQ)" by The Devil Makes Three.


	9. Like the Sun Chases the Moon

They make it out alive.

It’s touch and go there for a while. Lee’s sense of time slips and slides. Dean’s talking fast — _You can kill us in the morning. Just hear me out. That’s no god in there — he’s just a dirty old man. If I’m right, he’s gonna go up in flames. By morning, okay? Just don’t kill anyone until the morning._

His words hold for a while — an uneasy truce. Then they slip. It’s Julius who starts it — _The god wouldn’t want us to hesitate for even a moment. We must show faith in him; we must offer him these nonbelievers —_

There’s fighting. Brutal, hand-to-hand. Their opponents want them dead. Dean keeps blocking and retreating, blocking, retreating, and Lee must be following his lead, ‘cause they’re at the mouth of the cave again — there’s a cold wind at their backs. And then they’re knocked on their asses and it’s circling all around them, screaming —

Lee remembers that moment a lot, later. His back on stone, blood in his hair, a slow horror of pain arriving in his knee. Turning his head to find out if he still can and seeing Dean, dazed but struggling to rise; the ghost standing over him. Julius at the door, a long machete in his hand.

Lee remembers rolling. Hurling himself toward Dean on the power of his one good knee. He remembers rock hitting the other one, nearly whiting out from pain; he remembers scrabbling with his fingertips in the dirt.

Then there’s a scream, an unearthly one, and when Lee looks up the ghost is burning. Flames and vanishing ash.

They don’t stick around to see how the cult will react. It’s a long hike out to the road; Lee’s limping and bleeding. Dean supports him, Lee’s arm slung over his shoulder. They’re halfway when John’s truck roars up, dust swirling around its wheels. “You kids did good,” he says. “I’ll give you a lift you back to the Impala.”

“Not a kid,” Lee mutters, which he feels like isn’t how that line is supposed to go, but he can’t scrape together the thoughts to put it right.

Later that night he lies flat on his back in the motel room he doesn’t technically share with Dean, staring at the ceiling. Popcorn stucco. If he looks long enough, the shadows reverse themselves; down becomes up, in is out.

“My dad’s gonna split,” Dean tells him when he comes in. When Lee doesn’t say anything, he adds, “He seems — I dunno. He, uh. Asked me to check out a voodoo thing, down in New Orleans. If you wanna come.”

It takes effort, but Lee manages a smile. “I should rest up this leg. Take a little R&R. I’ll catch up to you later, maybe.”

“Yeah,” says Dean. “Yeah, sure.”

It’s a dangerous hunt. Voodoo. New Orleans. Lee should be getting angry at John Winchester, maybe, for sending Dean in alone.

He touches Dean’s face before he leaves — fits his jaw to the curve of his palm. He sees the worry flit through Dean’s eyes, so he grins to dispel it. “See you soon.”

Dean frowns. Just a little. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Me? Never,” says Lee. He sits on his motel room bed, injured leg propped out before him, listening for the echoes of the Impala’s motor rumbling long after it’s faded away.

\---

The marid practically falls into his lap.

He isn’t even looking for a hunt. Just drifting east, like he’s tied to a compass needle, one that points toward the last spot he knew Dean was; he hasn’t called. Isn’t sure he’s going to. It’s just, these days, he doesn’t know what else to do.

It’s an easy case. He’s drinking at a bar, stumbles through the wrong door, finds the thing locked in the basement; he doesn’t even really intend to feed it its old master. That just sorta happens. And then the next moment, Lee feels the pain ebbing in his injured knee. He can flex it properly for the first time in weeks.

“Huh,” he says.

So he keeps the thing locked up instead of killing it right away. Does a little research on marids.

The lore says they bring you wealth on top of health. Lee’s not sure how much traction one feeding will give him, but he figures he’ll do an experiment. Walks into a roadhouse he’s been admiring and says, to no one in particular, “Think I’d like to buy this place.”

The woman behind the bar gives him a harried look. “If you can pay the back property taxes, you can _have_ it. My dad ran this place into the ground.”

Lee makes the back taxes in two nights of pool.

It’s too fucking easy. Ridiculously easy. He doesn’t even have to feed the thing that often; a few times a year, the lore says. Shit, he’s already got the roadhouse. He builds a marid bunker in the basement, sets everything up, but — he’ll probably just kill it before the next feeding.

Then, a month in, some guy tries to rob the bar. Lee gets him knocked out and tied up and runs his aliases through a backdoor police database, and what d’you know: the guy’s wanted for murder.

_Ironic,_ Lee thinks as he hooks him up to the blood drip. He also thinks: _Better him than me._

\---

Sometimes Lee thinks about Dean finding him.

The thing is — Dean could. If he really wanted to. Lee hasn’t changed his name; he’s even got it on the title to the bar. Gone legit. The local newspaper runs a feature on him one time. He talks about how he loves old-school roadhouses; about all the good times, all the good friends, he’s had.

He imagines Dean seeing it, somehow, when he’s trawling the papers for cases. He imagines what Dean would say — how much he’d freaking love this place. _Swayze’s_. Come on.

But he doesn’t call.

Sometimes he’ll track a hunter moving through his neck of the woods. Working a case: monsters, whatever. Lee comes in a while after they’re gone. There’s always the vics that survive, and they always wind up haunted. Broken. Their families never know what to do with them. No one’s surprised when they disappear.

Lee can give them an easy end. They just fall asleep; no more nightmares. He always salts and burns the bones.

His own nightmares don’t die that easy. But that’s okay. They never have.

\---

There’s one time — about four years in — when Lee almost calls it quits.

He’s standing in the basement with a gun in one hand, cell phone in the other. It’s a prepaid burner, fresh out of the packaging. He still doesn’t like these things. The marid’s pressed against the door of its cell, eyeing him; maybe it knows he’s thinking about putting this bullet in its brain.

Then again, maybe it’s just hungry. It’s been hungry for weeks. Lee can feel his old knee injury acting up again. He dials Dean’s number with shaking hands.

No answer.

He tries the backup. _This number,_ says the mechanical female voice, _has been disconnected._

Lee drops his hand. The marid slobbers at the bars.

“Fuck off,” Lee breathes.

The slip of paper Dean wrote his contact info on was from a motel notepad, cheap shit; Lee’s folded and unfolded it a hell of a lot of times. The third number is worn almost to illegibility. Doesn’t matter; he knows it by heart.

He dials. The phone rings once, twice, three times. Then a sudden noise; a thump, and muttering, and a voice he doesn’t know growls, “This better be good.”

Lee freezes. He almost hangs up. Then he says, “I’m — calling for Dean. Dean Winchester.”

“Yeah, no shit,” comes the answer. “He didn’t give this number out to just anyone. You a hunter?”

Lee’s mouth feels like sandpaper. He’s caught on that word: _didn’t._ “Dean’s — dead?”

There’s a pause. When the guy on the other end speaks again, his voice has softened — just a little bit. “Almost four months now. I’m sorry, son.”

The marid’s staring at him through the bars. Black alien gaze limpid. It’d be real easy, Lee thinks, to start imagining he knows what the thing is thinking — how it feels.

He’s four months too late.

“If it's a hunt you're looking for help with,” the man who isn’t Dean is saying, “I’ll see what I can do —”

Lee hangs up.

“Just you and me now, pal,” he says out loud. The marid watches him; tilts its head like it’s trying to understand. There’s never been Lee-and-anyone, though, really. That’s the whole thing he was always trying to tell Dean, wasn’t it? Comes down to it — end of the line — it’ll always be you or them.

Ain’t no reason now not to embrace it.

He can remember — kind of — walking into that canyon at Dean’s back. He can remember thinking, _If I need to, I can always sell him out._ He can remember thinking, _If I need to, I won’t._

Back then it felt like something cured. Now it feels — he doesn’t know. Like there was pity in Dean’s eyes after that. Maybe disgust.

Hardly matters now. “You and me,” Lee says again, and goes to find his marid its next meal.

\---

It’s a decade and change later that a ghost walks through Lee’s door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "[Goodbye Old Friend](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84PWOG8i-dE)" by The Devil Makes Three.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed.
> 
> ETA, 1/10/21: I wrote a little coda to episode 1.06 that references Dean's relationship with Lee and the events of this fic — if you're interested, it's here: [Jackalopes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28670721).


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